Another raw and savage night of Champions League football at the Westfalen: the colours vivid, the sounds ear-shattering, the defences in utter disarray. And yet even as an elated Borussia Dortmund toasted this remarkable victory with the Yellow Wall, there remained the eternal question of whether they are ever going to allow us to take them seriously. Whether they will ever escape this riotously entertaining cycle of boom and bust. What kind of resistance they can offer against a Paris Saint-Germain side who have flaws of their own, to be sure, but do not struggle to punish porous, fidgety defences.
It was a flawed and chaotic tie, a tie that felt like a whole psychodrama in its own right, a tie Dortmund effectively lost twice and then won twice. Late goals from Niclas Füllkrug and Marcel Sabitzer secured a first semi-final since 2013, and while Atlético admirably fought back early in the second half, in hindsight it felt like the last stand of a stumbling and broken team, a fibreglass facsimile of the battleships Diego Simeone used to produce.
