Our soccer columnist Rory Smith offered a quick preview in his newsletter this week (sign up here):
Paris St.-Germain looked like it was waiting for the wave to crash. Chelsea seemed determined to resist until the storm hit. Only then did Thomas Tuchel’s team realize his powerlessness. Manchester City, meanwhile, had almost reached the coast. However, when it felt the tide turn, it could do nothing but succumb.
On the eve of the Champions League final, it’s hard to avoid the suspicion that this Real Madrid story could not possibly end in a disheartening 2-1 defeat to Liverpool in Paris. There’s been too much drama in the past two months, too much magic to end it any other way than smoke and fire and white ticker tape floating down from the sky.
Indeed, the test for Liverpool on Saturday – more than technical, tactical or systemic – is psychological. Real Madrid have managed to take the win from defeat to three of the best equipped opponents in Europe as the players believe in the club’s almost mystical refusal to wither.
But Madrid has been helped by the fact that the opposition tends to believe it too. At the Bernabeu in particular, there is a clear, almost palpable edge over otherwise experienced teams, a discernible realization that at some point – almost entirely unannounced – Real Madrid are going to do something elemental and inscrutable, and no one will be able to stop it.
To win the seventh European Cup on Saturday, Liverpool will have to break through that series. The manager, Jurgen Klopp, said this week he finds it more useful to avoid putting Real Madrid in a position to wreak his particular kind of havoc – easier said than done, of course – than just going to the highlights of those two crazy minutes. against Manchester City, again and again. “There are still 88 minutes left in the game,” he said.
In that sense, Liverpool is probably the toughest test Madrid could have withstood in the final. Not necessarily because it’s a better team than Manchester City – the Premier League table actually suggests it isn’t – but because in this Madrid it will see an echo of its former self.