So, how much more of this pain can Pep take?
Sixth stab at winning Champions League goes same way as the rest
IT now comes down to the issue of how much one team and one man can take. Manchester City and Pep Guardiola in the Champions League. Not so much a disappointment, more a long straight road littered with the detritus of one disaster after another.
Six times the Premier League’s most consistently brilliant team have tried to win this competition under Guardiola. Six times they have failed, each attempt even more calamitous than the last.
To think it used to feel as though the grand old Champions League trophy would one day be Guardiola’s to keep. That was back in his days at Barcelona, when Lionel Messi and company won it for him twice in three years.
Here, at City, it’s different and the painful truth for a club that wants so badly to consider itself among Europe’s elite is that it continues to get worse not better.
The further along the road they go, the further away they seem to get. Guardiola, it is worth pointing out, is only contracted at the Etihad Stadium for one more season.
Last May in Porto was a horror story. Having reached the final against Chelsea, Guardiola picked a baffling team and its performance was one totally aligned with the decisions they made. City lost 1-0.
Here amid a truly thunderous Bernabeu din, City fell to their knees again. This time it was different. This time it was possible to feel some sympathy.
They played so very well here for 89 minutes. Up until the moment Real Madrid substitute Rodrygo stabbed what seemed just a consolation goal into the City goal at the end of normal time, the Spanish champions had not managed a single shot on target. What followed, therefore, was freakish and impossible to explain. This is sport. This is what can happen.
So there is no blame to apportion to City. Not to Guardiola or his players. But that does not mean that there may not yet be consequence.
Not only do City now have to find a way to recover from this extraordinarily painful night in the long term, they must also do so in time for Sunday’s Premier League game with Newcastle.
City’s lead over Liverpool at the top of the Premier League is just a single point. Liverpool are a team running hot. Having averted their own European catastrophe in Villarreal on Tuesday, they will take the confidence of that comeback into the rest of the season and will also be buoyed by the fact they do not have to face City in Paris at the end of the month.
For City, the final two weeks of the domestic season will see them play four Premier League games that must all be won and the psychological and emotional challenge of that task is clear.
Here they were downed on a night of almost unspeakable drama. The aggregate scoreline shows they conceded six goals over 210 minutes and that is too many.
But they were so close to perfection. So, so close, as Guardiola himself would say. Had substitute Jack Grealish not been denied twice in the moments before Rodrygo’s first goal — once by a goal-line clearance and once by goalkeeper Thibaut Courtois’ toe — we would have been talking about one of the great performances by an English team in the Champions League.
The Bernabeu — currently looking rather strange in the midst of its £200million renovation — was nevertheless bouncing before kickoff and indeed as Real pressed in the early stages of the game.
This is a club that has the European Cup written through its very core. They do not grow tired of their favourite competition in the Spanish capital. The Madridistas see this as belonging to them and it is not hard to understand why.
But City’s football soon turned the feel and the rhythms of the contest in their direction. Kyle Walker — who played despite not being fully fit — becalmed the raging menace of Brazilian sprinter Vinicius Junior. Rodri, in the centre of midfield, kept the waters of the Madrid attack from breaking on the shores of the City defence.
and then, with only a quarter of an hour remaining, they scored. when they did so, the City support high up in that corner of the stadium celebrated what appeared to be their team’s passage to a successive final. Had they seen this through, they probably would have travelled to Paris as favourites. Instead, it’s Newcastle at home. If that one doesn’t go well then a season that promised City a treble until Liverpool beat them in the Fa Cup last month could feasibly end with nothing.
Guardiola, dressed all in black, ambled on to the field when this was all over looking for players to console. an embrace here, a pat on the back there.
This morning he will perhaps wonder why Kevin De Bruyne failed to bring his best to this stage. He may wonder if a centre forward would have made a difference.
But this wasn’t really about any of that. This was sport and this is what sport does. It’s how Guardiola and his players respond that will tell us most about them.