A Son of the Rock

UEFA Champions League (sic) semi-final, first leg, Santiago Bernabeu Stadium, Madrid, 27/4/11

This season’s quarter-finals notwithstanding, matches in the so-called Champions League are frequently sterile affairs with teams tending to cancel each other out. There is perhaps too much at stake for the football to be anything but efficient and relatively unimaginative.

This exemplified the trend. This was unedifying watching at best, ugly at worst. A petty, ill-tempered, niggly, fractious affair. A playground tiff interrupted by flashes of football. The residue of too many games between these two in the recent past I suppose.

The play-acting was reprehensible and the questioning of the referee’s decisions went too far; not to mention him being mobbed at times. And as for players asking officials to show cards – red or yellow – to opponents, well it’s about time this was made an offence in itself. If I was a ref I’d be tempted to treat it as dissent and act accordingly. But then I suppose a ref who did this would not stay a ref for long.

In the end we got three sendings off – one of a player who, due to a fight among the subs at half time, never even set foot on the pitch!

The home side played defensively – and still lost. They might also have lost if they had tried to attack but the spectacle would have been more bearable. Whether the imbalance of numbers made the telling difference to the result is of course difficult to assess.

As it was Jose Mourinho’s tactics were far from what the name of Real Madrid is supposed to stand for, a betrayal of the club’s attacking traditions.

The beautiful game this was not.

Except for one flash of genius which wasn’t enough to redeem what had gone before.