Perhaps the most telling moment of Tuesday’s 1-1 draw at the Bernabéu came nine minutes into the second half as Erling Haaland finally located a clear channel of space down the side of the Real Madrid centre-backs and set off towards goal with that easy surging stride, range finders starting to bleep and flash, finger poised over the kill button, eyes narrowing behind his aviators, target locked on.
At which point David Alaba produced an extraordinary recovery tackle. Jockeying back to within sliding range, Alaba hurled himself in a gymnastic semi-pirouette around Haaland’s raised shooting foot. Still sliding, still processing the maths, the drag vectors, Alaba successfully hooked his own left foot in front of the ball’s predicted path and blocked the shot as it pinged off Haaland’s toe towards the far corner of the goal.
Alaba got to his feet and bumped chests with Dani Carvajal. There were urgent low fives as Madrid prepared to defend the corner. This was good, really very good indeed. But Alaba does have a history of pulling off this kind of last-ditch miracle-tackle.
Haaland’s reaction was probably most telling. He basically looked quite surprised. This doesn’t happen to him much. Haaland is too quick, too decisive in his movements. But this was pretty much his night, 90 minutes during which he was as quiet as he has been at any point since the inauguration of the Cruyffian “box” (layman’s version: five big lads at the back) that sparked City’s current steamrollering run.
The nullification of Haaland was a triumph for Carlo Ancelotti’s defenders, in particular Antonio Rüdiger, who can look frantic and frazzled and, frankly, like he’s playing in a pair of wellies, but is a high-grade warrior when it comes to the detail of one-on-one duels, who grappled and scragged his man to stop him from turning, to the extent that by the end the most noticeable Haaland at the Bernabéu was probably Alfie, captured on film in an altercation in the stands, and who also ended up being manhandled to safety by a powerful-looking man in local uniform. Like father, like son.
The point is, this is allowed to happen. Other footballers are also good. And with all due respect to the defenders of Fulham, West Ham and RB Leipzig, and indeed to the Premier League, where scorelines of 4-3 and 6-0 and 5-3 have become common. There are reasons why Tim Ream and Angelo Ogbonna are not faces you come across on bravura midweek global TV gigs while a voice shrieks “nous sommes les meilleures” and Manchester City fans dispense imperial V-signs from a pen in the gods.
Madrid in midweek has been the elite standard in club football for the past decade. This is meant to be hard. Nobody was pocketed here or exposed as a fraud. Instead the lesson of Alaba’s craft, of the entire tone of an occasionally cold, always engrossing draw is that Real Madrid’s success is really not based on magic or witchcraft or some kind of anti-Pep spirit energy; but on elite players doing elite things.
None of this is news, of course. But it is a useful point of perspective with the task of trying to dissect and anatomise that 1-1 draw already well under way. This is, of course, totally outcome-based. Win by the odd goal in Manchester and City’s caution in Madrid becomes a genius-level act of game management. Lose by the odd goal and yet again this bald fraud has blinked in the eye of the storm, spiked his own guns and all the rest.
At least in this case the criticisms will centre on under-thinking the occasion. Where were the zany tweaks, the counterintuitive picks? Where does Pep get off picking the same team that has won 15 out of 16, scoring 52 goals in the process?
The reality is, of course, quite simple. City were cautious because Guardiola believes this is the best way to win, and because he made the logical choice to learn from last year, where City’s attack of Phil Foden, Riyad Mahrez and Gabriel Jesus (total goals: lots) failed to protect the counterthrust in the way Jack Grealish and Bernardo Silva (total European goals this season: one) have done in recent weeks.
Pep explained afterwards that he picked “players who keep the ball” because “if the game got crazy we would not be as good at that as them”. Nobody bottled anything here. Guardiola instead did something entirely in keeping with his vision of the game; a vision will, by its nature, occasionally come up a little cold. The fact remains a 1-1 draw in Madrid is the best result City have managed so far across the three semi-final games between these two teams.
It leaves City narrow but also vulnerable favourites to go through. At which point it is worth adding some detail to the scale of that task. Because Madrid are, lest we forget, exceptionally good. Vinícius Júnior was the best attacking player on the pitch, confirming his status as one of the genuinely elite creative players in world football, a 22-year-old who continues to add clarity and incision to the most vertiginous occasions. It is surely time for Brazil to decouple themselves from Neymar just a little, to build a team around this more orderly attacking phenomenon.
For all the enduring parts, Madrid’s team is also being quietly flooded with youth. Eduardo Camavinga, who made the goal for Vinícius, is 20. Add Jude Bellingham to that mix, which may well happen given the current chatter, chuck in Aurélien Tchouaméni and who knows, maybe even Haaland in a few years (Madrid seem to believe this will happen), and it isn’t hard to see another dynasty emerging here.
At the end of which both teams will be happy with that 1-1 draw, which simply clarifies the task at hand. But to call it a chance missed, or even a bottle job or a choke, is to fail to see the scale, and indeed the beauty, of the occasion.
This City team are as close to a total victory machine as anyone in English football has got in the modern era. This is what Madrid met, and disarmed, for now, at the Bernabéu, not with magic or a blink in the light from their opponents, but with that layered slow-burn draw that still leaves a razor-edged parity at the Etihad in a week’s time.
