Man City Crash Out in Penalties to Familiar Foe

By way of championship pedigree, football heritage or perhaps just riding their luck, Real Madrid pushed past their new European rivals Manchester City to move on to the semifinals of the Champions League.

Manchester City vs Real Madrid is sort becoming a classic Champions League matchup in realtime. Real’s ridiculous last minute comeback in 2022 where they scored two goals in two minutes at the end of the second leg to equalize, and eventually win in extra time. Man City’s emphatic and vengeful 5-1 thrashing of Los Blancos in last year’s semifinal. It seems whenever these football juggernauts collide, sparks are due to fly, this year’s edition being no exception. 

The first leg at the Bernabéu was the epitome of box office football. An end to end, back and forth, seesawing affair where the individual, world class ability on both sides shone. Foden and Gvardiol’s incredible curling strikes from the edge of the penalty area, followed by Fede Valverde’s sweet volley left the game a well fought 3-3 stalemate with all to play for at the Etihad in Manchester. 

For the first 15 minutes of the second leg, it was pretty much a continuation for the first game. City popping the ball about in Real’s half, looking for a final pass to unlock the defence as Real waited for an opportunity to hit them on the break; and they did. After Jude Bellingham brilliantly brought down a long ball from Dani Carvajal, Real worked the ball well down the right channel for Vinicius to finally cross the ball into an unmarked Rodrygo, who capitalized once again. 

From then on it was basically a bombardment on the Real Madrid defence. City boasted 67% of the ball possession throughout the game, but to Madrid’s testament, they just even’t able to carve out any real clear cut chances. When Jermey Doku came off the bench to replace Jack Grealish, a burst of pace was injected into the game and City became much more dangerous down their left hand side. It was Doku who eventually forced the goal for City, when he beat Valverde near the byline and put a low left footed cross into the penalty area that Toni Rüdiger couldn’t deal with well enough. The loose ball fell to Kevin De Bruyne of all people and he cleverly roofed the ball into the net, beyond Andriy Lunin.

Momentum was in City’s favour for the remaining 10 minutes of the game and they perhaps could’ve won in regular time. Doku’s impact was felt again when Real sent two defenders to double up on him outside the penalty area. Manuel Akanji took advantage of the space behind them and was well found by Doku before he fizzed annotate dangerous ball across Real’s box. It was again met by KDB who uncharacteristically leaned back on his strike and sent the ball over the bar.

That’s what killed Manchester City, failure to take their chances. Many will say and understandably so, that City played the better football and perhaps deserved to win the game. But this is football, there is no such thing as deserving to win a game, a team has to go out and make it happen; something that City has done for years and years with their patented style of play, but this time it wasn’t enough.

Credit to Real Madrid, who defended for essentially a whole 90 minutes with extra time included, they didn’t leave much space for City to create many chances. Apart from the two De Bruyne moments, the only real look at goal City had was a Bernardo Silva cross that Phil Foden missed his kick on during extra time. Haaland was again well marked by the Madrid centre backs, Rüdiger and Nacho – who replaced Aurélien Tchouaméni – put in great shifts. Their team shape was well disciplined and it was clear that all the players bought in to the idea that they needed to shut City out as best as possible if they were going to advance. 

On the ball, however, Real were quite poor, which in turn further invited City’s onslaught on their box. Passes were often misplaced under little pressure and when building out play from the back, they seemed to be out of ideas. Time after time they would work the ball backward all the way to Lunin, who would often be pressured into clearing the ball and effectively granting City possession again. After the Rodrigo goal was scored it was quite obvious that they planned to fallback and keep City out and when they couldn’t do that, Plan B was to take the game to penalties.

Which they succeeded in doing. This was only Manchester City’s second time in seeing extra time in the Champions League (the first was also against Real Madrid) and their first ever penalty shootout in the competition. Despite it taking place in Manchester the odds heavily leaned toward Real’s favour, and it very much showed. Two poorly taken City penalties from Mateo Kovačić and Bernardo Silva were what spelt City’s demise as Madrid scored four of their five penalties to advance to the semifinals for the fourth consecutive season. 

Kevin De Bruyne and Erling Haaland were absent for the penalty shootout as they were substituted for Kovačić and Julian Alavarez respectively. In a post game press conference, Pep told reporters that both players had expressed wanting to come off for the remainder of the game. Curious, as both are capable of changing a game in a mere moment, and it’s been suggested that they both surely had to be carrying injuries to want to come off in the biggest game of their season thus far.

Each of the last two times these two have met in the Champions League, the winner of the tie has gone on to win the whole competition, whick bodes well for Los Blancos. They gear up to face Bayern Munich in the semifinal. The first meeting of the two since 2018, when they also met in the semifinal stage.