Such is the way with Champions League finals of the last decade: you can come up with the perfect plan, create chances and quell the great players on the opposition side and then, when the crunch comes, Real Madrid win it anyway.
So it was for Borussia Dortmund, who capped an engrossing performance at Wembley with the kind of defeat that would have felt like a surprise were it not for Carlo Ancelotti’s side’s record in this competition. There is no better team in the world at disguising a historic win as a mediocre performance and so it proved again for Real when Dani Carvajal, their 32-year-old veteran, glanced a header in with just 16 minutes to play.
Dortmund had thrown all their best punches. They had hit the post, they had run in behind and then when they had failed to get beyond the great Thibaut Courtois there was a growing sense of foreboding. Dortmund knew what was coming. Just as it had in the semi-final against Bayern Munich, the usual killers were lurking for Real – first Carvajal and then finally Vinicius Jr.
The latter had, for all the mediocrity of the Real performance, been a giant. He had driven forward with the ball while others had struggled. He had demonstrated to Dortmund and the world in general that here was a player of considerable talent. He won the corner for Carvajal’s goal with an exquisite piece of skill that was – in its most basic terms – a nutmeg on the Norwegian full-back Julian Ryerson, but was so much better than that. He was the enduring sign that this is a Real team of some quality even when its back is against the wall.
Then it was Vinicius Jr who scored the second, taking the ball from Jude Bellingham’s pass and finishing with such certainty that the Englishman had his arms in the air before the shot was struck. Bellingham did not have a great game by his standards but he has his first Champions League now at the age of 20. He will play better in other finals, one assumes, and like many of his Real team-mates this was for some periods a game that passed them by until the crucial latter stages
This is the club’s 15th European Cup. More than twice as many as the next contender, AC Milan. Six of those 15 have come in the last 11 seasons. It has been an extraordinary turbo charge. Ancelotti now has seven himself – five as a manager and two as a player. Toni Kroos came off at the end in his last club game celebrating wildly in front of the Real fans even with 10 minutes to play. This was his fourth Champions League at Real and the fifth of his career.
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