It didn’t take long for the away goals apologists to rouse themselves. One defensive performance from Real Madrid at Paris Saint-Germain was all it took for them to bemoan the abolition of a law that has manipulated football since it was trialed in the Cup-Winners’ Cup in 1965–66 and predict the coming of an apocalypse of negativity, the descent of football into attrition, time-wasting and spoiling.
In the four games since the change of regulation, though, away teams have scored eight of the 10 goals thus far in the knockout stage of the Champions League (Manchester City’s five did the heavy lifting). Of course, that is not a sufficient sample size to judge anything, but then neither is one performance from a Madrid side that was worried about the fitness of center forward Karim Benzema.
Madrid had played fairly similarly in its three group games away from the Spanish capital, preferring to sit relatively deep and play on the counter, which had yielded three wins without conceding a goal. That, almost certainly, would have been its approach with or without the away goals rule. It’s how Carlo Ancelotti tends to manage away games in Europe. And that tendency was only ever going to be heightened by the need to negate, as far as possible, the pace of Kylian Mbappé and prevent him exploiting any space behind the defensive line. Given how Dani Carvajal struggled against Mbappé anyway, it’s probably just as well he was given additional protection.
