Benfica’s 98th minute winner shows how football can still provide thrills aplenty even in a convoluted and confusing end to the Champions League league phase
Football, as Benfica goalkeeper Anatoliy Trubin showed, finds a way. Jose Mourinho still somehow finds a way through.
You can introduce multiple convolutions, that will create some confusion - and foster a certain cynicism about otherwise fun nights like this - as wealthy English clubs still dominate anyway… but Trubin’s 98th-minute header showed what we’re all here for.
Benfica had been admirably leading Real Madrid 3-2, but that in the 97th minute of a match where the scoreline suited neither. The Spanish club were being consigned to the play-offs, the Portuguese club were going out, and that just one place outside the top 24.
So, realising the situation in that penultimate minute, Mourinho ordered his goalkeeper up. And Trubin duly plundered a thunderous header to keep Benfica in the Champions League.
A goalkeeper. In the 98th minute. And - consequently - a great moment from a great game, forming a great story enriched by great characters. And, through all that, there is still a pointed lesson.
The Trubin moment was partly made by how clear the stakes were. This was Benfica going out altogether. It was real jeopardy. You didn’t have to look elsewhere to figure out its significance. You couldn’t look anywhere else.
There’s still some old Mourinho magic there, as the country most bedazzled by him still imposed brutal economic reality on the competition.
The Premier League is the wealthiest domestic league and it duly had five teams in the top eight, with Newcastle United missing out by a mere two points, after some squandered late chances against Paris Saint-Germain.
If such analysis seems a little sour after seeing that, the purpose of the media is to say what all of this means, and these seemingly conflicting sentiments can absolutely co-exist.
A Super League by stealth, with concerning long-term effects, can still be the stage for brilliant moments in the short term.
And this final night of course had a lot of them. It was always going to be fun, if a little chaotic, but Benfica - as well as Bodo-Glimt and Sporting - ensured it rose above that. It ended with supreme spectacle.
As to whether one night justifies months of low-stakes low-intensity football? That's a different but still pressing debate.
The Champions League is supposed to feel like that 98th minute in Lisbon, but not necessarily all the games leading up to it.
Perhaps talk of an actual Super League will rise up again now that Florentino Perez has been frustrated. A common statement on the night was that Real Madrid and Paris Saint-Germain are out … except that’s just out of the top eight.
The seemingly forgiving nature of the bottom sides in the 24 might make that look like it isn’t too much of a punishment, except Bodo, Qarabag and Benfica may have something to say about that.
We may even have an immediate Madrid-Mourinho rematch. No one will want to go to Bodo, meanwhile, as they followed a victory over Pep Guardiola with one over Diego Simeone.
If Benfica were the story of the night, the Norwegian upstarts have been the story of the entire group stage, and now make the play-offs. They go down in its history.
One of the issues with the modern Champions League, however, is actually that such surprises stand out all the more because it doesn’t allow enough of them.
And as moreish as all of this was as a television event, there were moments when the bombastic drama was undermined by just how much was going on.
The sudden significance of a goal was often undercut by the need to immediately figure out what it actually meant, and that sometimes when something happening elsewhere instantly changed it anyway.
Even a goalkeeper scoring late on, after all, wouldn’t have had quite the same effect if you also had to simultaneously work out what it really meant. The sudden-death knock-out nature was what Trubin's moment was all about.
There are evidently still tweaks to be made with this final Wednesday as a television event, which is what is very much designed to be. And, amid occasional confusion, rather fittingly, there were some developments that didn’t quite make sense.
If you are going by this table, the best teams in Europe are Arsenal, Bayern Munich… and crisis clubs Liverpool and Tottenham Hotspur. It is quite something when Spurs finish higher than PSG, Madrid, City and Barcelona but can’t beat West Ham United or Burnley. Liverpool meanwhile made Qarabag look like some lower-league FA Cup side, and yet the Azerbaijani side finish ahead of Roberto De Zerbi’s Olympique Marseille and Antonio Conte’s Napoli.
Those two coaches, still considered two of the best in the world right now, are somehow out of this hugely forgiving format. Liam Rosenior meanwhile showed his acumen in out-thinking Conte, even if he was aided by a resurgent Joao Pedro. The forward is now one to watch for the remainder of this season.
Conte’s awful record in Europe continues, just as Sporting’s progress does.
That’s despite the Portuguese team recently losing a supposedly generational coach and their best players. Sporting instead show the value of strategic structural regeneration.
That also allowed them to disrupt a top 10 that would have otherwise aligned to last week’s Deloitte Football Money League quite a lot. That, of course, is what many of the game’s stakeholders insisted on making this about.
Tuesday actually felt quite a strange evening as it was a rare midweek night without any elite football. There was almost this vacuum, that was then totally countered by the complete opposite on Wednesday: more football than you could possibly take in.
Eighteen games, it has to be said, is a lot; almost too much. It’s also the way the game is going, as we can see with the World Cup. More, more, more, whether you like it or not.
Trubin and Mourinho, with impeccable timing, then showed what it should be about.
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