Manchester City v Real Madrid lived up to the hype with a couple of ludicrous goals in a 1-1 Bernabeu draw never less than enthralling and which sets up the second leg rather wonderfully.
Good that, wasn’t it?
That was no surprise, of course. Manchester City are currently Europe’s standout football team and it’s long been the case that the Champions League does things – good things – to Real Madrid to render any concerns or failings evident in their domestic work moot.
Such is Real Madrid’s aura on these Champions League nights that it’s all too easy to convince yourself things are all going to some preordained plan even when they conspicuously are not. City gave their hosts an absolute chasing for the first 20 minutes here and if Madrid’s plan all along was to sit in and wait for their moment they surely can’t ever have really planned for it to look quite like this. Certainly the vast majority within the stadium weren’t happy with the apparently passive approach the home side were adopting as City made their patterns all over the Bernabeu.
Then Madrid scored. Obviously. This is what they do. It was a lovely, lovely goal. It began with the deftness of Luka Modric 25 yards from his own goal and ended with the startling violence of Vinicius Jr 25 yards from Manchester City’s. In between Modric’s press-evading flick and Vinicius’ outrageous finish was the galloping panic-inducing surge of Eduardo Camavinga.
Suddenly an untroubled City defence – John Stones had spent most of the opening 20 minutes casually sauntering around in midfield – was backpedalling and in trouble but they still had safety in numbers and Camavinga had little by way of options.
What he did have was Vinicius, who accepted the pass and unleashed something really quite extraordinary. “Unstoppable” is an overused word in football, but you wouldn’t really have wanted to test the physics of that one. Despite the distance from goal and the fact it was nowhere near the corner, Ederson was never in any danger of having his fingers ripped clean off his hands by it.
It’s the sort of goal that on slow-motion replays looks like it might have been bad goalkeeping, but at full speed the sheer ferocity of it meant no blame could be attached to the keeper.
Yet the most startling thing about Vinicius’ goal was, ultimately, that it was only the second sweetest strike of the evening.
Kevin De Bruyne’s equaliser – richly deserved by City on the balance of…
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