“What Mbappé thinks is what Benzema thinks, which is what Vinícius thinks, which is what Messi thinks,” Carlo Ancelotti said, pretty much saying it all, or at least trying to. And he hadn’t named half of them yet, the list lengthening a few minutes later even without citing Neymar when he added Marco Verratti, Ángel Di María and Mauro Icardi.
“If you start to think about the names, you’ll lose your head,” he noted, looking for all the world like a man who never loses his. “It’s better to think about what we will do.” The point Ancelotti was trying to make is that, strip it all away and there is a football match to play: one delivered by a dodgy draw, neither club happy with the result when it was redone, and one that he said “could easily be the final”.
