“The thing about Madrid, even from what I have known, is beginning to be supernatural. This team is not credible,” two former white players commented at half-time. Their script, the script by Raúl Gonzalez and Álvaro Arbeloa, seemed to begin to fall apart with Bayern’s goal in the second half playing for nothing, Real’s usual heritage to give the anti-Madrid fans something to talk about: play to win and if I’ve seen you, I won’t I remember. Raúl, with a smile in the stands, said after the German goal: “These guys don’t know what they just did.” Boutade, okay. But there was an algorithm working behind it. A very powerful one.
Raúl had said it, we heard it, I wrote it down on my phone thinking “you really don’t know what you’re saying.” I said it to a legend in bass. And then he spent his life running over everything. Joselu twice, in just a cluster of bombshell minutes, and the entire Madrid emerged from the impossible hat of its Champions League nights to head towards London, to set the helm in the direction of its impossible history.
And everything had started strange, with the smell of low tide. With the white lamb Bayern in an unbearable hell. Do they do it on purpose or not? Bayern presented the first 45 minutes in Madrid so weak and apparently vulnerable that a twisted mind could wonder if everything was due to the perverse tactic that Muñeco Gallardo founded in River Plate, when he said that his team had been playing badly in recent months to mislead on the contrary before a final. Was Bayern, eternal German bête noire, factory of derogatory victories, playing fiction with Real Madrid? It didn’t seem like it. When a team gives the ball away and therefore redoubles its effort (some run the ball, others run after it) it is because it is clear about what to do when it has it. But Bayern were not clear about anything at the Bernabéu. He was only clear that it is Bayern, and that sometimes in life there are things that are achieved by being who you are. Because the rivals have more respect for the past than the present, and Bayern’s past is terrifying enough not to think that the present could appear. He did it in the 68th minute with a heartbreaking blow from Davies with a changed leg like Gvardiol because there are people who wait an eternity to make the best shot of their life. Such a beautiful stadium, such a legendary rival: how can you not shoot with your bad leg as if God had screwed it on you at half-time.
Bayern obeyed their legend, nothing is easy in certain clubs even when they take the ball away from you, and Madrid obeyed theirs: quick slap to score the tie, annulled by the VAR. “We’re here again, it’s time to do the same thing again,” was heard in the Bernabéu when the clock struck the 80th minute. By then the Bernabéu had already adopted the irrational form of David Lynch’s nightmares. That moment in a soccer game when the least important thing is the soccer. The moment of Madrid, the moment of the beast. One minute after the end Solari and Roberto Carlos speak. “With everything I have done for you!” the Argentine told him. And from all that history, from all that sacrifice of years and that faith that is inherited as unusual illnesses are inherited, the illness of winning, comes Madrid with its flag, and the work of art that it has built in decades of its final minutes.
You can follow The USA Print in Facebook and xor sign up here to receive our weekly newsletter.
_
