Last-minute drama doesn't get better than when there's so much NARRATIVE that it's difficult to know where to start.
Despite the best efforts of the game to iron out all of its creases over the years, football remains at its best when it dissolves into chaos all around you. At such points, the game ceases to be what those in control want you to believe it to be and becomes what it actually is. No longer an exhibition of elite athletes performing their chosen discipline, it instead morphs into the human condition, with all its foibles and insecurities denuded in front of an audience of millions.
It’s not a matter of scripts that couldn’t be written. They absolutely could. It’s more that these are scripts that would be thrown out for being unbelievable, or perhaps that, despite the modern tendency to want to know exactly what’s going to happen before it happens, sometimes there simply isn’t one in the first place.
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It all becomes a brief reminder thatthe future isn’t written yet, that there’s nothing preordained about any of this. The story of what happened in Lisbon at the end of the final Champions League megagroup match between Benfica and Real Madrid is one full of unlikely coincidences and other disparate elements both relating to the past and the present all binding together in time and space.
Firstly, Benfica vs Real Madrid isn’t just any old match. For the first half of the 1960s, these two tussled annually - along with Inter - to be the champions of Europe. Benfica became the first club who weren’t real Madrid to win it, in 1961. The following year, they came from two down to beat Real 5-3 in the final to repeat the feat.
This ended, of course, withThe Curse of Guttman. When Bela Guttman was sacked by the club the following year, he is claimed to have said, "Not in a hundred years from now will Benfica ever be European champions again." They’ve reached eight European finals since then, and have lost all of them.
Furthermore, Real Madridneed a result from this match. Defeats against Liverpool and Manchester City have left them at risk of missing out on a top eight place and an automatic spot in the last 16 of the competition. An extra two matches is something they could well do without, given that they’re a point behind Barcelona in La Liga with 17 games of their domestic season left to play. And there are others lined up to take their place in that top eight, should they stall. Barca, who end up finishing in fifth place, will not have to go through this.
Secondly, Benfica are not an especially happy club at the moment. Last season, they finished second in the Primeira Liga to Sporting. This time around, they’re in third place, ten points adrift of Porto, despite still being unbeaten in the league. Trying to stay in touch with that top twolooks like… a challenge, at the moment.
They haven’t been the national champions since 2023, and there have recently been protests at the way in which the club is being run. They’ve already changed their manager once this season, and they went into this match needing a win of having any chance of avoiding early elimination from the tournament.
And then, of course, there’s the head coach himself. Bruno Lage was fired from a cannon into the sun in September and replaced by one Jose Mourinho. Now, it’s easy to say that Mourinho is “yesterday’s news” these days, to a degree, and his decision-making had little to do with the outcome of this particular match.
Beyond the fact that he was one of those standing on the touchline who hadn’t realised until practically the last possible moment that his team still needed another goal to win, this madness had been taken out of his hands. The decision had been taken to hold onto their 3-2 lead and leave the decision in the lap of the Gods, until it became clear that the Gods might not necessarily be on their side, if left to their own devices.
We’re into stoppage-time at the end of the match at the Estádio da Luz, and it’s been an eventful evening already. Real took an early lead, Benfica came back to lead 3-1, and were then pegged back to 3-2 with half an hour left to play. Both teams need something that they haven’t got. Both teams - although at least one of them doesn’t realise it until very, very late indeed - still need another goal.
Two Real players are sent off in stoppage-time, Raúl Asencio, who’s spent the evening playing as though he’s got a wasp in his underwear, picks up a second yellow card in the 92nd minute. Rodrygo follows him four minutes later, for the daftest of reasons; one yellow card for kicking the ball out of the Benfica goalkeeper Anatoliy Trubin’s hand, and a second for complaining about it almost immediately afterwards. Take a moment to enjoy their conversation in an otherwise silent dressing room, given what happened next.
Trubin, meanwhile, is taking his time over getting restarted. A winshould be enough. But then somebody realises. They need another goal, or it will be Marseille heading into the play-offs at their expense. Mourinho has already made all his changes, so there’s nothing more than he can do apart from feverishly order his players forward.
All the other games have finished and 3-2 won’t be enough. There’s one final opportunity, a free-kick on the right-hand side. Suddenly, those two red cards matter. Benfica have eight players in the penalty area as the kick is taken but Real have only six. Trubin heads into the penalty area for a final roll of the dice.
Fredrik Aursnes’ free-kick is beautifully delivered, and it’s the goalkeeper who gets there first, powering his header past Thibaut Courtois and in. Pandemonium. The goalkeeper, who has clearlynot prepared a pre-scripted goal celebration, makes it about thirty or forty yards back up the pitch before being subsumed by his team-mates.
Mourinho celebrates with a ball boy. All of this, to be clear, wasn’t really much to do with his ‘aura’ or anything like that, but the extent to which he retains a gravitational pull for stories such of this nature - and against one of his former clubs, just a couple of days after his 63rd birthday - remains as astonishing as ever.
And as if to top it all off, the team eliminated from the competition as a result of all of this is Marseille, the team of Mason Greenwood. That terrible person and the club who pay him handsomely being eliminated as a result of all this is a cherry on this particular cake.
None of this drama justifies the distended megagroup stage of the Champions League, of course. We had to wade through seven rounds of treacle to get here, and the domination of English clubs is a concern who those who want a little diversity in this competition. Benfica are a massive club, but they fall into that category of those who used to be highly competitive at this level but who broadly can’t be any more, a list which includes Ajax, Feyenoord, Celtic, Rangers and others.
But it’s also important to remember that moments such as this are when football is momentarily taken out of the suffocating choke-hold of money. UEFA will have been rubbing their hands with glee at the virality of the moment, but draw the lens back a little and it’s clear that this moment was a little bit of pushback from the rest, and a small reminder of why we all get involved with this stupid game in the first place.
And as for Benfica, well, 62 years on fromThe Curse, they’ve still never been the European champions again. With Mourinho in charge, perhaps they’ll feel that this year is an opportunity to set that straight. They’ll likely run into the realpolitik of the 21st century game again at some point, all that Premier League money, or another reality of this stratification that masquerades as competition. But they’re still in it for now, even if explaining how they are does stretch the boundaries of credibility, somewhat.
Accompany image byWalkerssk fromPixabay
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