Where will this luminous epic end? Where will they draw this devastating energy even though they suffer on the edge of twilight? With Real Madrid this season, the questions fly as quickly as the turnarounds. On Wednesday evening, the White House made another fantastic comeback by eliminating Manchester City in the semi-finals of the Champions League (3-1, ap) after snatching extra time in added time thanks to a brace from Rodrygo (90th, 90 + 1e).
For the Spanish press, it is sometimes necessary to admit defeat in the face of so much irrationality. “May God come down and explain it”, headlined the daily Marca. “Don’t try to figure it out. This is Madrid, the king of Europe, the best of the greatest night ever told,” reads the inside of the newspaper. The Mundo Deportivo underlined the supernatural dimension of this football evening by referring to the film by Harold Ramis (1993). “A day without end”. Actor Bill Murray lives there tirelessly on the same day in a small village in Pennsylvania. The famous program “El Chiringuito” also talked about cinema (and literature) after the match, comparing the Spanish champion to “Robin Hood”.
Ancelotti has confirmed that he is now playing on this spring in the dressing room. “The video I showed before getting on the lawn was a video of all the lifts we have already done this season, which are eight in number. And the video ended with the following message: One is missing. And we succeeded. »
“It was sport and that’s what sport does”
It therefore took ten minutes for Real to play its favorite scenario. A brace from Rodrygo then a penalty at the start of extra time from the number one contender for the Ballon d’Or, Karim Benzema. “It is no comfort at all to a broken Manchester City to know that their name will go down in history, a desperate and unwanted history, like the team that tackled the 90th minute of the second leg seemingly certain of reach the final and a date with what she believes to be her destiny and who, in 10 minutes, conceded the three goals that eliminated her. Only 10 minutes. No more,” lamented The Telegraph.
His English competitor from the Daily Mail is not recovering much better from this nightmarish night, which saw the Cityzens fail once in C1. “Six times the brightest side in the Premier League have tried to win this competition under Guardiola. Six times they failed, each attempt being even more calamitous than the next (…) On Thursday morning, Guardiola may wonder why Kevin de Bruyne failed to give the best of himself on this ground. He may wonder if a centre-forward could have made the difference (…) But it wasn’t really all that. It was sport and that’s what sport does. It’s how Guardiola and his players react that will tell us the most about them.”
“Need one or two days” to digest, warns Pep Guardiola
The Mancunians have four games left to retain the lead in the Premier League and this small point ahead of Liverpool. “We need one or two days but we will get up, we will go back up,” promised the Catalan technician for whom “something strange happened” on the Bernabeu lawn.
“Stop messing around… It’s not possible”. Guardiola may have whispered the same thing to himself as Messi who would have hallucinated in front of his screen, according to his friend Sergio Aguero, now a consultant for ESPN Argentina. “Soccer friends. As in life, luck does not exist in football. Either you dominate the game or the game dominates you. Ah, what would football be without the Brazilians! “, for his part wrote the Barcelonan Dani Alves on his social networks. A tribute to the hero of the evening, Rodrygo.