Rage, rage against the dying of the sky blue light. Or, alternately, don’t rage at all. The scoreline read 3-1 by the end, but for long periods on a lovely soft February night at the Bernabéu this felt like an act of extended sporting cruelty, an opportunity to sit back and watch the players of Real Madrid pulling the wings very slowly from an aubergine-shirted butterfly.
The key executioner was Kylian Mbappé, who barely seemed to sprint, or wrinkle his shirt, let alone dig into the outer reaches of his talent en route to a clean, crisp, almost uncontested hat-trick.
Was this a great Mbappé performance? It had the metrics of one for 61 minutes: 20 touches, seven shots, three goals. It came against Madrid’s great European rivals of the past few years. It was also frictionless, almost unnervingly easy, first because Mbappé is brilliant, and second because his opponents were so utterly lacking in fight, desperation, or any kind of internal resistance.
Before kick-off there was a report that the home fans’ tifo display had been cancelled at the last moment. According to the Spanish press the planned banner read: “You won’t leave the Bernabéu alive,” a message deemed, when it came down to it, to be not very nice and kind of a death threat. In the event it was only half right, because City didn’t enter the Bernabéu alive either, or show any obvious signs of animation until it was too late.
Instead they spent the first half moving about like zombified figures, a Manchester City team haunted by the ghosts of itself. There was a terrible pathos in the sight of Pep Guardiola at the edge of his technical area, alone in all that air, head gleaming tenderly under the lights, hearing his team laughed and cheered and rondo’d off at the home of his great Iberian rivals. There is at least some certainty now that his greatest City team is formally over. This was its wake, albeit a weirdly joyless one.
For three minutes at the start Madrid did nothing at all. Then they scored, the goal made by two touches. Raúl Asencio lofted a straight pass that drifted over the head of Rúben Dias, who seemed spooked by Mbappé pirouetting into space behind him, a man suddenly playing football on the moon.
Ederson had ambled into a strange position off to one side, perfectly placed for Mbappé to lift the bouncing ball up into the evening air and then down in a gentle parabola into the City net. Mbappé and Vinícius Júnior did a synchronised leaping, grinning celebration. Lads, it’s three minutes in. They’re doing a leaping grinning celebration. This is a problem.
Mainly it was a problem for Abdukodir Khusanov, played out of position at right-back and left to endure a public nightmare by his manager on the same side as Mbappé and Vinícius, the graveyard shift, a role he just isn’t ready for.
Each time Vinícius got the ball one-on-one on that side there was a low, sensual hum from the crowd. With 22 minutes gone Khusanov found himself upfield and was left whirling like a man trapped in an invisible revolving door by Vinícius allowing the ball to run across his body, vast open tracts of space appearing in that simple movement. Khusanov sprinted backwards in dream-like slow motion, agonisingly late for the game of his life.
Khusanov’s worst moment arrived on 33 minutes as Madrid scored their second. The final pass fell between Mbappé and Vinícius at the edge of the area. Khusanov seemed mesmerised, unable to decide who to stand near while they scored and choosing instead to stand near nobody as Mbappé took the ball and training-gamed it into the corner.
This already felt like an exhibition, with fond applause as the white shirts ran across to take a corner, Vegas-residency style. Even Madrid’s shots at goal felt a little disdainful, a team teeing itself up, gilding the moment. There was no approving roar at half time, just a ripple of polite applause, like the interval curtain falling in a metropolitan theatre. City’s players will have felt it, and hated it.
For Mbappé, this will go down as another night of ascent. “Mbappé came for nights like this!” the Spanish press had fanfared before the game, and this is undeniably true. For Mbappé this is a legacy-minting exercise, a ladder towards the Ballon d’Or, the iconography of triumphant memes, knee slides, T-shirt message reveals, appalling million-dollar tuxedos, a necessary bookend to his World Cup genesis seven years ago.
It will require more robust tests than this. City are a strange sight when they fall apart like this, but then this has always been an unusual sporting entity, so smoothly engineered, so annihilating in victory. It makes sense that it should collapse in the same easy way. The movements are still there, the outline of footballers ranged in the same patterns.
But this was the footballing equivalent of a quiet stroll around the morgue, no mess, no blood, just an absence.
