Pep Guardiola’s team is of course not the first to experience this. It’s hard to say whether it’s something about the Bernabéu that does it, or whether it’s the effect of feeling like you’re living in a self-fulfilling prophecy, but this place has an unparalleled ability to make even the biggest players, the smoothest teams. It warps the brain, scrambles the code, shorts the wiring.
It also happened to PSG when Gianluigi Donnarumma tripped over the ball and Neymar and Lionel Messi disappeared from view. It also happened to Chelsea at the last minute – or what seemed to be the last until recently – with the European champions seemingly walking to victory and then, without ever realizing it, staring down the course of defeat.
City, more than anyone else, should have been immune. It’s hard to imagine a team more at home in its ideas than Manchester City – although Liverpool would have a case – or a team better equipped to stand firm by its principles.
And yet City froze too. Even before it all fell apart, it seemed inhibited, restrained, hurt by something, a reduced version of the team that – with a little more ruthlessness and a little more luck – could have scored six or seven in the first leg last week. It was only after Riyad Mahrez had scored that it had found some peace of mind, when the prospect of a final against Liverpool at the end of May was so tantalizingly close.
That is ultimately the effect of Real Madrid’s faith. It believes it will win with such conviction that it turns out to be contagious. That’s the form his magic takes: it’s a glamour, the power to dazzle an adversary, to convince him that the world should be as you see it, as you would like it to be.
It cannot be explained. It doesn’t actually require any specific ingredients, if any at all. There can be no sound, no hope, no spark and no time, and yet Real Madrid can still conjure it from the sky, from the sky, from something deep inside. It’s something that happens, something that happens to Real Madrid and anyone who is unlucky enough to get in their way.
