Real Madrid and Benzema put out Atalanta fire to sweep into quarter-finals
They have lived on edge this season, but when it came to it Real Madrid were able to ease their way back into the quarter-finals of the Champions League after two years away, returning to a place that is much more familiar for the club. Led by the velocity of Vinícius Júnior, the control of Luka Modric and the grace of Karim Benzema, they were on their way to the next round with goals from Benzema, Sergio Ramos and Marco Asensio on a windy, quiet night at Valdebebas.
Ultimately they were just too good for Atalanta, and yet when he looks back on this tie Gian Piero Gasperini may well conclude that his team were complicit in their own demise. Over the two legs a red card, an awful gift of a goal and a penalty were the key moments that led to Atalanta’s elimination, 4-1 on aggregate. As, perhaps, was their failure to be themselves.
A first leg conditioned by Remo Freuler’s early sending off had been won by Ferland Mendy’s late goal, concluding a set-piece routine that Zidane admitted was not supposed to end at his feet and finally breaking Atalanta’s resistance. But the regret went beyond just the result. “We didn’t play as we wanted; parking the bus is not our style,” Gasperini had said, and nor was it in their interest this time. They were not going to wait, and they should have led after just 127 seconds. But that identity – their identity – did not last long. And when it returned, it was too late.
Had they scored at the start, who knows how it might have ended. Luis Muriel pulled back to Robin Gosens but with a weak wave of the foot on the edge of the six-yard box his shot went straight at Thibaut Courtois.
A tentative Madrid found themselves forced back, Ramos having to stick in a toe as Muriel slipped the ball through for Mario Pasalic, Cristian Romero seeing a volley blocked and Berat Djimsiti’s effort going over. The early pattern was also illustrated by Courtois kicking the ball straight out of play, which was at least the sensible thing to do – and how Marco Sportiello would wish he had followed suit at the other end.
Modric began to take control, Vinícius was up and running, and Atalanta’s momentum soon vanished. Madrid might have scored when Vinícius and Benzema combined, only for Djimsiti to dive in front of the Brazilian; they did score just after the half-hour, when Sportiello hit the ball straight at Modric. The pass was dreadful, the control superb, and Benzema was in support to put Madrid ahead, Atalanta’s most decisive shot having been aimed at their own foot.
The Italian side were denied what might have been another when Muriel was found just outside the area only for the chance to be curtailed by the clock and the referee’s whistle for the break, which arrived bang on time. Atalanta’s players departed down the tunnel shaking their heads and returned with Duván Zapata replacing Pasalic. Not long after, Gosens was replaced by Josip Ilicic, who sought to liven up proceedings.
Yet by the time Ilicic was introduced, Vinícius had almost scored a glorious second, evading defenders only to nudge fractionally wide. And if that run did not yield a goal, the next one did, effectively ending the contest. Ilicic lost possession and Vinícius was away again, Rafael Tolói bringing him down as he headed into the area. From the spot Ramos scored his 20th consecutive penalty for Madrid.
Atalanta awoke, but they had too far to go and Courtois standing in their way. Ruslan Malinovskyi’s brilliant ball cut a path through the white shirts to leave Zapata one on one, but he shot straight at Courtois and the same happened when he escaped Raphaël Varane’s lunge and let fly again. Between those chances, Benzema had headed against Sportiello and put the rebound off the post. As a tie it was over, even if as a game there was time for more, Muriel bending in a brilliant free-kick before Asensio ended it to ease Madrid into the quarter-finals.
The second best moment in golf right now is the moment right before Bryson DeChambeau lines up a big drive. There’s the initial flurry of excitement as he unsheathes the big dog from his bag. A little sumo-bounce of the hips, the sense of an immense and gathering power. A couple of taps on the ground. And then the coil, the swing, the devastating crack of metal, which is – needless to say – the best part of all. Then lots of American men holler like caged animals, and DeChambeau howls something unintelligible before bounding down the fairway after the ball.
DeChambeau is 27 years old, is ranked No 5 in the world and has a record of one major win and one top-10 finish in 17 attempts. On the face of things, this is an unlikely platform from which to launch the single-handed destruction of an entire sport. But none of this on its own seems to explain why DeChambeau inspires such awe and fear in equal measure: a product not just of his success, but the bold and iconoclastic way in which he has gone about it.
You only have to listen to the way people talk about him: the fixation on his physical strength, the 40lb of weight he put on during lockdown, the moral panic inspired by his immense distance off the tee, the way rivals and rulemakers alike seem to wilt in his mere presence. Rory McIlroy admitted last week that he tried to imitate DeChambeau’s
power game and ended up messing with his swing in the process. The R&A and USGA are about to restrict the rules on driver length in an apparent attempt to Bryson-proof their courses. After he declared his intention to circumvent the 18th fairway at Sawgrass by driving the ball up the 9th fairway instead, organisers quickly declared the route an internal out of bounds.
Perhaps the timing of DeChambeau’s emergence as an elite challenger, coinciding as it did with the absence of crowds, heightened this sense of mistrust: the sense that with his scientific bent and gym-built power, DeChambeau seemed to portend a cold new vision of golf’s future: bloodless, artless and driven by algorithm. The impression was only deepened by DeChambeau himself, who looked exactly like a golfer that would be conjured up in a Silicon Valley robotics lab: drilled by machine learning, fed a variety of choice human phrases and dressed up like a real live boy.
Ultimately, I suppose, this boils down to what you want out of your sports stars. Do you want them to be relatable and recognisable, witty and humble, extended versions of your own idealised social circle, the sort of person you could imagine going for a pint with? Because no, DeChambeau is not really one of those people. For a start, he doesn’t really seem like much of a pint-drinker. He would probably hold it up to face-level, swirl the liquid about suspiciously, tap the glass with his nail a few times. He would probably have lots of questions about viscosity and glycerol content.
And then, unimpressed by your answers, he would probably disappear in search of greater intellectual fulfilment, probably to the fruit machine, which he’s noticed hasn’t paid out in 68 minutes and seems to have a clear cherry bias.
But perhaps, when you’re sitting on your sofa with the television on, the calculation is a little different. Perhaps you just want to be entertained.
Perhaps you just want to see someone ridiculous doing something ridiculous.
Give me jaw-dropping feats and outlandish bodies. Give me your wired and your weird. Give me a man who trash-talks Augusta itself, who shouts at the ball like it’s a dog, who signs autographs with his left hand for no reason at all, who claimed in a GQ interview last year to be able to live to “130 or 140”. Give me a golfer who has something called a “muscle specialist”, who practises so hard he occasionally ends up on the brink of fainting.
This goes beyond regular sporting obsession. Really it’s a form of madness, the madness of the method actor who starves himself for a part, or the artist who sits in a glass box for four days while people stab her with pencils, the madness of Eliud Kipchoge or Simone Biles or Robert Lewandowski. We celebrate the madness not just because it pleases us but because we know on some level that this is how we evolve: through experimentation and disruption and ridicule and suffering, the spark of insight that bunts the whole edifice a little further down the road in the process.
Perhaps this is why DeChambeau has inspired such angst within golf. In a sense, this is a sport that has always been reluctant to change, suspicious of disruption, that on some level imagines itself as the last little oasis of sanity in an ever-maddening world. Spoiler alert: golf will be fine.
Maybe a few tee boxes will need to be moved. Maybe a few par-72s will have to become par-70s. Maybe in a more muscular, youth-oriented sport a few contenders will fall by the wayside (although given the top two at Sawgrass were the wiry Justin Thomas and the 47-year-old Lee Westwood, perhaps the juicification of golf will have to wait a while longer). But, at the same time, perhaps a sport desperate to connect with new audiences has just stumbled on its most brilliant, alluring presence in years. DeChambeau may wreck golf. He may save golf. In the long run, the two will probably end up looking very similar.