Expect some sparkling fare from two great clubs who between them have claimed almost a third of all European CupsIls sont les meilleurs.Sie sind die Besten. Related: Liverpool’s Roberto Firmino: shy, strong-willed – and a complete striker Related: Joker, thinker, friend, dictator: the many faces of Jürgen Klopp Related: ‘I don’t feel like an underdog’: Jürgen Klopp eager for Real redemption Continue reading...
Liverpool’s task in Kiev on Saturday is finding a way of beating a team who feel totally at home in Champions League finalsSaturday’s Champions League final in Kiev promises to be that rare event, a meeting of outstanding teams that lives up to its billing, though the television trailer advertising that the contestants have 17 European Cups between them is economical with the truth.The figure is correct; it is just that Liverpool’s total of five is dwarfed by the Spanish club’s dozen. Not many teams can make Liverpool feel inferior in Europe but Real Madrid can. The current holders of the trophy have a habit of making everyone feel inferior. No one else is in double figures. No one else...
The defining image of this Real team isn’t a priestly boot room or the intellectualism of total football. The defining image of this team is Cristiano Ronaldo’s absOh. He’s here again. The man with the rapacious desire for annihilating success in his eyes. In the end it was a strange kind of glory for Cristiano Ronaldo on Tuesday evening as Real Madrid progressed precariously but also, somehow, inevitably to another Champions League final.There has been a lot of talk about Ronaldo’s stripped-down role in his late prime. But this was a performance of such minimalism it might have been etched on a grain of rice, a vision of the ultimate endgame some years from now whereby Ronaldo is wheeled on...
There is a sense Real Madrid could be sleepwalking towards a hammering in the Champions League final but Liverpool showed against Roma they cannot be trusted eitherThere was a point on Tuesday night when the thought occurred that this Real Madrid are like Brazil at the 2014 World Cup, a gifted but complacent side who could be sleepwalking towards a hammering.Marcelo’s “We are Real Madrid” comment, and the sense of entitlement it implied, suggested he had learned nothing from the humiliation of Belo Horizonte. But then came Liverpool’s anxiety-riddled progress on Wednesday and the realisation that even after the improvements of the past four months, they still cannot be trusted. Either side could score six in Kiev; both may. Nobody...
Bayern thrashed Zidane’s side 2-2 and there is plenty to suggest a knockout blow can be landed on their elegant glass jawReal Madrid tried so hard to lose this semi-final. Bayern Munich tried so hard to win it. That neither could achieve this apparently shared aim speaks in the first place to Real’s pure champion will and secondly to that nexus of game-management, calamitous Bayern defending and something close to a kind of white-shirted voodoo, the ability to win even while in the process of sputtering and panting like a stalled presidential motorcade.This was a fun, wild, oddly drunken game of football that ended 2-2 at the Bernabéu and 4-3 to Real on aggregate. At the end of which a...