This team simply never gives in. Fighting until the final whistle is in our blood
– Carlo Ancelotti, Real Madrid coach.
There was nothing. There was no noise. The stadium Santiago Bernabéu stood silent, subdued, waiting for the bell to toll. There was no spark.
Real Madrid had long since run out of ideas, and they were running low on hope, too. Most pressingly, there was no time. There were 30 seconds left, plus maybe a little extra purgatory, and then it would be over.
Los Blancos’s campaign in the UEFA Champions League (UCL) in the 2022/2023 season ran on magic and miracles. The comeback against the glittering array of Instagram influencers arranged in the vague shape of a team by Paris St.-Germain (PSG). The revival against Chelsea hinged on a single, unstoppable pass from Luka Modric.
But there comes a point when reality has to intrude, when the chaos has to give way to order. There are certain inevitabilities that even Real Madrid, football’s great self-actualisers, a team that runs exclusively on the power of its own imagination, has to acknowledge. This was one of them. This was the point where all of it came to an end.
And then, in a single, blinding flash, it happened. There were no warning signs, no rumbles of thunder, no auguries and no harbingers.
One minute Manchester City was in complete control of its semi-final, leading by a single goal on the night and by two, a yawning chasm, on aggregate. Jack Grealish had missed a couple of chances to add a little gloss to the score line, but nobody seemed overly concerned.
Then, in a beat, the world turned upside down. With 89 minutes and 30 seconds played, Rodrygo reacted quickest to Karim Benzema’s knockdown and stabbed a shot past goalkeeper Éderson. He gobbled the ball from the back of the net, and sprinted straight back to the halfway line.
The Bernabéu stirred to life. The 76,000 Madrisdista were going wild.
“Well, it’s happened again. It’s happened so often, players never stop believing — it’s simply something magical,” said my daughter Bella.
On the side line, the fourth official, I saw Davide Massa, was fumbling with his electronic scoreboard. He lifted it above his head, the number six illuminated in bright, lively green: six more minutes.
Now, suddenly, there was time, and it carried hope in its wake. Real Madrid, though, did not need it. It does not work like that. It swept up the field again. Dani Carvajal conjured a cross. There was Rodrygo again, his header flashing past Éderson.
This time, he did not seek out the ball. Instead, he raced off, sprinting to the edge of the field, careering as close to the stands as he could. His teammates followed him. The fans poured over each other, a liquid mass, in their delirium.
This was exactly what my wife, kids and I had been expecting when we arrived at the stadium a few hours earlier, and still we could not quite conceive of how, exactly, Real Madrid had done it.
Nor, for that matter, could anyone else. It does not seem too florid, too ethereal, to suggest that Real Madrid does not so much beat teams at football as overwhelm them by harnessing some elemental force, something that naturally occurs in its environment.
Its players spend a considerable portion of their time encouraging their fans to make more noise, whipping them into an ever – increasing Eleusinian frenzy, for that very purpose.
At times, it resembles a form of alchemy, the transformation of a succession of base metals — a smattering of garlanded veterans, a couple of raw hopefuls, a coach with an expressive eyebrow and an easy charm, a team with no recognisable, cogent plan beyond a pervasive sense of its own destiny — into something precious.
Here, though, it was something else, something more akin to a Big Bang. Real Madrid did not particularly like the turn the universe was taking. It did not have any great desire to exist in a dimension in which Manchester City was in the UCL final and it was not. So it simply, in the blink of an eye, created a new one, one it found much more to its liking.
That second goal, the one that sent the game to extra time, marked the moment that one reality ended and another came into being; Manchester City was now living in Real Madrid’s world and the ending in Real Madrid’s world is always the same.
“As soon as we scored one,” my wife told Bella, “I absolutely knew we would — and could — go after the winner and actually get it.”
A few minutes into extra time, Benzema tumbled over Ruben Días’s outstretched leg. The referee, Daniele Orsato, pointed with a theatrical flourish to the penalty spot. Benzema, obviously, scored, because Benzema was always going to score. In the space of five minutes, with a break and a breather in between Manchester City’s understanding of how things worked had been shattered.
Pep Guardiola’s team is not the first to experience that, of course. It is hard to tell whether it is something about the Bernabéu that does it, or whether it is the effect of feeling like you are living in a self-fulfilling prophecy, but this place has an unrivaled ability to unsettle even the greatest players, the smoothest teams. It scrambles the brain, jumbles the code and shorts the wiring.
It happened to PSG, too, when Gianluigi Donnarumma stumbled on the ball and Neymar and Lionel Messi disappeared from view. It happened, too, to Chelsea at the last — or what seemed, until very recently, like the last — with the European champion seemingly coasting to victory and then, without ever really noticing, staring down the barrel of defeat.
And yet the City, too, froze. Even before everything fell apart, it had seemed inhibited, cagey, troubled by something, a reduced version of the team that might — with a little more ruthlessness and a touch more luck — have scored six or seven in the first leg last week. It had only found a little composure after Riyad Mahrez had scored, when the prospect of a place in the final against Liverpool at the end of May was so tantalisingly close.
That, ultimately, is the effect of Real Madrid’s belief. It believes it will win with such conviction that it proves contagious. That is the form its magic takes: it is glamour, the power to dazzle an opponent, to convince it that the world should be as you see it, as you would want it to be.
It cannot be explained. It does not require specific ingredients or any ingredients at all, really. There can be no noise, no hope, no spark and no time, and yet Real Madrid can still conjure it from the air, from the sky, from something deep within. It is something that happens, something that happens to Real Madrid, and to whoever has the misfortune to be standing in its way.
Sure enough, the 14-time European champions scored in the 88th and 91st minutes to turn the game around and stun Bayern Munich, 2-1 recently. Not only did the victory send Los Blancos to its sixth UCL final in 11 years, where it will face Borussia Dortmund at Wembley, England on June 2, it also cemented Real Madrid’s place as perhaps the greatest comeback team in sports.
A Por La 15! Hala Madrid!
The views expressed here are those of the columnist and do not necessarily represent the views of New Sarawak Tribune.
