Man City stare down era-defining second leg against Europe's dizzying shapeshifters
There is a Real Madrid for every moment of the big games: from cornered and snarling, to whirling all around you, passing through and running in behind, and next week in their own stadium Pep Guardiola's players must be prepared to play all versions.
Carlo Ancelotti's team performed on each of their settings in the first leg. One moment just surviving and then suddenly running the show. This epic Champions League semi-final goes to its second leg with a sense that Manchester City, the great force of English football, have carved an advantage for themselves. Although what that might represent is hard to tell. So much about the spell that Real cast is about the unexpected shifts they force in a game's genesis – and that lesson was hard learned by Guardiola's players last season.
City might never be able to say how they went from being so sure of their bearings, with 70 per cent of the possession, to all that reassurance being swept away with a flick from Luka Modric and a hit from Vinicius. Real can do that, to even the City of 2023.
The great Guardiola teams – especially the great Barcelona team – planed away at opposition with the dizzying fluency of their passing, and the suffocating nature of their possession. This Real dynasty of five Champions League titles in the previous nine editions do it differently. They shift in character throughout the match – and for much of the first half they even felt vulnerable at times, as the City passing sequences amped up and the Guardiola possession machine moved forward.
Even after the home side had taken the lead in the 36th minute, the right-back Dani Carvajal put a shoulder into Jack Grealish – with all the grace and subtlety of a vengeful 1950s centre-half – to send the Englishman stumbling into the digital perimeter boards. Toni Kroos and Antonio Rudiger both had the same idea to kick their old Germany team-mate Ilkay Gundogan. These were just the highlights of a first half of strategic fouls.
Real had suffered under the tyranny of a typical Guardiola first half when the City passing total easily exceeded 300 and their opposition did not even make half that. For most teams that face City, a first half of that nature is generally the end of the story.
Yet by this stage, Real had scored, a breath-taking counter-attack launched by Luka Modric's first-time touch back into the path of the breaking Eduardo Camavinga. To describe it, in the football vernacular, as a nice pass around the corner would scarcely do justice to Modric's moment of vision. It went around the corner and came back from the shops with the week's groceries.
This was the moment that the game's character started to change. For long periods at the start of the second half City struggled to regain anything like the control they had enjoyed before the break and they had to live with much of the indignity of surviving on the back foot, that Real had previousy endured. Ancelotti's players went from a team who did not seem much to want the ball to one who would not give it back.
Yet City faced every iteration of Real on this night and survived. Kevin De Bruyne scored an equaliser when it looked like City might have lost their way in the game. The screw is rarely turned on them in the Premier League like it was at times in the second half. This is City's chance, at home next week with all the impetus of the slender advantage that a second leg in your own stadium brings.
This was the hardest game for Erling Haaland, a striker who requires some kind of collaborative effort to launch him goalwards but increasingly found himself obliged to do it alone. His 21 touches over the night were the fewest of the 22 starters, and the key takeaway is that if the chances do come on Wednesday there may be no more than two. The same could be said of Grealish who started the night twisting Carvajal’s blood and then, despite his part in the goal, never quite had his moment in this high-quality game.
These are the stakes now for Grealish. He has to measure himself against peers like Vinicius in this, the fleeting golden years when he, like any leading player, will find himself at the top of the game. Occasions like next Wednesday will be the evenings that define his career – the difference perhaps between one Champions League title, or two – or none. Can he have the same effect on his team as Vinicius did?
Big questions for City's players as they approach this defining second leg against the defending champions. No doubting Guardiola's belief in his side. This manager who long insisted to the Premier League on his right to five substitutions did not make a change all night.
Not that Real were far behind in that regard. From the old guard, Kroos played 84 minutes, Modric three more than that and Karim Benzema the whole thing. Real are a beautiful football team, perfectly calibrated between young and old in the ebb and flow of their respective careers. From the craft of their old boys, and the fresh legs and new ideas of the young. Camavinga played left-back and then latterly midfield and looked like he could have done the second leg there and then too.
The longer Real go on like this, confounding the decline that is always expected to come – the greater the mythology around them. That, in no small part, is what City face next Wednesday. That nagging fear that there is always one more breath: or more prosaically, seventh minute of time added on and Benzema suddenly, inexplicably, unmarked at the back post. If City do get past Real in a week's time it will feel like the spell has been broken. If any side can do it – then it is them.
