Shortly after the post‑World Cup resumption Pep Guardiola made some comments about Kevin De Bruyne; sighing a little, looking sad, bemoaning by sly implication the physical state of his champion midfielder.
As motivational obiter dicta go it was brutally effective. The Belgian has been sublime on the current winning run. This has been late imperial De Bruyne, a resurgent wave, buried a little behind the cold, hard numbers of Erling Haaland playing (and this is no coincidence) just ahead of him.
It was De Bruyne who pulled himself up to his full height at the Bernabéu; and who seemed, with a single moment of brilliance, to cause a shift of the narrative pressure in this ongoing two‑hander.
City needed it, too. By the time the ball was rolled back to De Bruyne by Ilkay Gündogan with 67 minutes gone the Bernabéu had already begun to seethe and purr with a familiar self-generating triumphalism. Manchester City had spent much of the game to that point chasing ghosts, had gone to half-time at 1-0 down, and seemed to be losing themselves once again in the white zone.
Pep Guardiola’s team had strangled Madrid for long periods early on. Madrid took their punishment, held their lines. City’s poise, their endless stitching in midfield came to nothing. This was like watching an idea come up against an emotion – systems play, clean lines, grooved movements, planned phases – versus a kind of sporting dieu et mon droit.
Towards half‑time Guardiola, dressed for the occasion in a skinny-fit undertaker’s suit, had begun to point and gesture and revolve his arms more urgently, seeing shapes, premonitions, ghosts, flickers of disaster.
And of course Madrid scored. Eduardo Camavinga made it, surging forward from left-back, rolling the ball to Vinícius Júnior, who let it run across his body then shot so fiercely into the top corner that even with full view of the ball and the striking leg Ederson could only flail at fresh air. Half-time came like a glorious breaking wave around the home stands. City were being dragged into that place again.
Madrid had been a lovely soft summery place at kick-off, a powder blue sky fading to grey above in the small hole between those towering steel struts. The Bernabéu is a Frankenstein’s monster of a super-ground, still half-built, bandages swinging in the breeze, a glimpse of gleaming steel sub‑shell peeking through here and there.
Inside it is both hugely impressive and brutally functional, like watching football inside a super-prison, or a planetary-scale shipping container. There were the usual devotional songs, coronational stuff, the swirling white scarves, the sense of self-celebration, pomp, flash. No other venue in sport performs quite like this. It is both absurd and strangely jolly.
Guardiola had picked his best team, but also a team geared for control. Jack Grealish and Bernardo Silva have one goal between them in the Champions League this season. Their presence isolated Haaland just a little more, paring him back even more starkly as the chief goal threat. Haaland is 22. This was his first game here. He worked hard, but found little joy.
And City’s night was heading one way by the time Gündogan did some bits, some stuff, some jinks and feints to make space for what he seemed to know would come next. Gündogan nudged the ball into the space in front of De Bruyne, calculating the angle of the run, the space, the distance to goal. There is a kind of networked thinking in moments like these, an air-drop of ideas. De Bruyne took two quick steps and struck the ball with a lovely severity, snapping down on it with the outside of his foot, like a pistol hammer dropping, and sending the ball always into the same space, hard and low and skimming past Thibaut Courtois’s all‑consuming grasp and into the corner.
In that moment something seemed to break, to become a little less heavy. De Bruyne was already having a fine game. There were shots, crosses, dribbles. Haaland’s impact has been stunning. But this is still City’s best, most forceful, most alluring creative player.
There is a sense with De Bruyne of a footballer entering the dog days of his prime. He will be 32 in the summer. This is not your Identikit snake-hipped elite athlete. On his off days De Bruyne looks like a very fit geography teacher who does hill walking and enjoys real ale.
At his best he still has that rare mix of bullocking power and the feet of a fine point artist, the designated free radical in this team, and the closest thing in City’s squad to a Madrid-style player.
City will now be narrow favourites at the Etihad. It felt fitting that it should be De Bruyne and a single piece of brilliance, Madrid-ball in Madrid, that made the difference.
