I was thinking of calling this one "Cruel Old Game Part 3" or something like that, because the sense from reading the coverage of yesterday's Champions League final is of a great injustice perpetrated on Liverpool by Real Madrid. And you could say that Ramos's foul on Mohamed Salah, which took Liverpool's leading scorer off the pitch just half an hour in, is most assuredly not in keeping with the spirit of the game.
But that reading, and the focus on Liverpool keeper Loris Karius's mistakes, and the general attitude at the Guardian of how Liverpool could and should have won, distracts from the fact that Real Madrid are simply the better team.
I'm not pretending that it's a difficult thing to type, because as I pointed out to my friends watching with me yesterday, in theory I hate Real with the white-hot intensity of a thousand suns, but in practice I couldn't find it in my heart to get too excited for Liverpool either. My first experience with Real may be of them beating my beloved Juventus in the first Champions League final I ever watched, and then of luring away Zinedine Zidane, but in the years since I have come to appreciate Real more as this ruthlessly efficient unit that doesn't seem to win a load of leagues but dominates in Europe.
It's all Sid Lowe's fault, of course, for writing such a good book about the rivalry between Real and Barcelona.
Coming back to yesterday's match, what struck me in the run-up to the game was the attitude among British football journalists that because there was a chance for Liverpool to win, that it (seemingly) meant they definitely would. They pointed to Mo Salah's scoring record, both at home and in Europe, and made fanciful claims such as (I'm not kidding here) the four teams top of the English Premier League were the best in all of Europe.
Someone else suggested that Real would win because of their "street smarts", which he questioned on the face of it, but also implied that they were a limited team who would rely on trickery and fouling (which I guess is borne out by that Ramos foul, but whatever).
These statements miss a couple of points. Real may rely on buying galacticos rather than building a machine with interchangeable parts (like Barça does), but that doesn't mean it doesn't have any cohesion. And it also doesn't mean that Cristiano Ronaldo carries the team the way he does Portugal.
What we saw yesterday was Gareth Bale come off the bench and score two wonder-goals, whereas Salah came off to be replaced by Adam Lallana, who's struggled for fitness and barely featured this season. The other option for them would have been Dominic Solanke, who has apparently scored just one professional goal in his life. Money doesn't guarantee you winning, but it does mean you have a deeper bench - and apparently Liverpool's transfer balance this year is slightly in the black.
That's not a bad thing in itself, because profligacy isn't a great long-term strategy for a football club. But it shows the level the two clubs are competing on, and comes back to the point I made a long time ago about how illusory English clubs' dominance in the league was between 2005 (the last time Liverpool won it) and 2012. Remember that despite reaching the final every year in that run except for 2010, the English team won just three times.
On the claim that the top four teams in England are the best in Europe, I have even less to say. It reminds me of something a friend said while I was in London this winter, that the bottom teams in the Premier League were better than any of the teams in any of the other leagues, which is equally fanciful and hard to prove. It's possible that, it being a World Cup year, English folks are getting a bit caught up in the excitement of having a decent team, but still.
Sure, Liverpool may have gotten to the final, and beaten EPL champs Manchester City to do it. And sure, England may have had five teams in the Champions League this year, of whom four got to the knockout rounds. But it's been a deeply weird season, with neither Manchester United or Spurs, who finished above Liverpool, not having great domestic runs.
Jose Mourinho's stewardship of United is marked by his usual negativity, which brought the team a distant second place 19 points behind the champions, and losses against all of the promoted teams. Meanwhile, Tottenham seemed to regress a bit compared to the last couple of seasons, with the adjective "Spursy" being thrown around again for the first time in a while as they didn't quite make the grade in Europe or the FA Cup.
And suggesting that the entire league is better than the best in Europe is strange, when you consider how Burnley lost about a million times and still managed not to budge from seventh place, either up or down. The race to win was settled quite early, but the race to avoid relegation went on pretty much until the final day of the season.
So I'm looking forward to hearing the Guardian and Totally Football podcasts' thoughts on the final, because I think they've missed a few points about Real in the run up to this game.
As for Liverpool, it'd be exciting to see them get back to this point next year, but to compete they'll have to strengthen considerably. And to be honest, that challenging in Europe will have to be accompanied by better performances at home, because it's not right to score the second-highest number of goals all season and still not be able to challenge for the title. Real may have had a bad (ish) season, coming in third, but they weren't as far off the pace as Liverpool were.
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