Sometimes football is silly and sometimes it is more fun for it. On a night when there were 37 shots and the goalkeepers shared thirteen saves between them, some of them absurd, José Mourinho’s Real Madrid found a way to beat his former team Inter in his first Champions League night of his second spell. Just don’t ask exactly how.
Except perhaps to cite Thibaut Courtois, whose astonishing save in the 89th minute saw them hold on to the advantage given them by first-half goals from Kylian Mbappé and Fede Valverde themselves. You would say that they had shot themselves in the foot, only if they tried, Courtois would probably save that too. This wasn’t always good, in fact at times it was terrible, but they had got through somehow.
When Madrid scored the first, this grand arena cheered but they might as well have laughed too. That Madrid led really didn’t make much sense; not when it came to the goal and not when it came to the game either. It had taken Madrid four minutes to get a meaningful hold of the ball, and by then Courtois had already made a superb save from Marcus Thuram.
But now, somehow, they led. Ninety minutes later, they still did. Inter had been playing round them with what looked like an ease, until suddenly even the simplest things looked complicated.
Hakan Calhanoglu had just fired off the third shot and Lautaro Martínez the fourth when it happened. Inter had enjoyed 65% of possession which actually felt like rather more until then suddenly gave it up, and in a way that was comic. Under pressure from Trent Alexander-Arnold, Curtis Jones made a mess of the first ball, playing it back for Yann Bisseck who for one brief moment seemed to lose his bearing and his footing.
Stumbling like someone had put his legs on the wrong way round, he gave it away to Brahim Díaz who first time sent Mbappé away and he finished past Josep Martínez. It was Madrid’s first shot, gifted their attack, and the opening goal. If that was absurd, what came next was even more ridiculous.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
