A penny… a pound… a million dollars for the thoughts of Pep Guardiola? One wonders what thoughts the genius mind of the Catalan coach conjured up at the sight of seeing the Bernardo Silva red card in just the 19th minute at the Etihad, only a week after the magic performed by Fede Valverde at the Bernabéu, playing for the team he cannot seem to beat anymore, the side that have done that thing again: winning in the Champions League.
Did his Einstein-like brain, the one that practically re-invented modern football, come up with something profound? Something unique? Something imaginative? Or did it go back to its primal roots? A product of millions of years of evolution? FUCK!
I wouldn’t blame him if he did. Because that’s sometimes all one can do when Real Madrid, a team so terrible they sacked their manager earlier in the year and have failed to beat all of Girona, Elche, Osasuna, Getafe, and Albacete this season.
But the Champions League turns them into something else. Something that science and numbers and geniuses cannot describe. It’s something primal that comes out of the players, something honed and defined and perfected over the years. Their perfection on those special nights is as natural as the reaction the opponent has when it finishes, and Madrid have won again.
“It was a shame that we couldn’t play 11 vs 11″, he said in the immediate interview after the game, “I tried to close the spaces inside in the second half, we put a lot of players in front of the ball and tried to pick them off.”
“We’re an extraordinary team, look at the first 15 here today and the first 15 at the Bernabéu, we play really well. We have to carry on, keep going, and try to finish the year well.”
Sometimes it’s all you can say.
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