Chelsea's thrilling victory over Barcelona was followed by an unpredictable game in Madrid, but will the final follow suit?
This week's matches have proved once again that the semi-final is the connoisseur's choice of football match. No stage before this has the significance to get fans, players and neutrals equally excited, and the only stage that follows is too frequently ruined by players' nerves, and their desperation not to be the one who's blamed – and someone is always blamed.
The second leg between Barcelona and Chelsea deserves all-time classic status for its combination of constant tension, unpredictable plot twists and, quite a lot of the time, excellent football. It's no surprise that Real Madrid and Bayern Munich failed to match it, but they certainly tried. With 27 minutes gone and three goals scored, anything seemed possible. The 90 minutes that followed might have been goalless but they certainly weren't chanceless: this was stalemate, not sterility.
But there's little chance of an all-time classic when Chelsea meet Bayern Munich next month: semi-finals frequently whet our appetites only for the final to turn out dry and tasteless. The list of calamitous climaxes is lengthy, with recent highlights including the 2010 and 2006 World Cups, and the dismal 2007 FA Cup final between Chelsea and Manchester United mercifully ended by Didier Drogba's extra-time goal (English football's great showpiece rarely has much to show these days: four of the last five have finished 1-0; it says something about the event that the 1996 final is widely considered among the most memorable of the last two decades, pretty much entirely because one of the teams wore interesting suits).
The Champions League final isn't that great either: not since Liverpool's absurdist triumph on penalties over Milan in 2005 have both sides made significant contributions to the evening's drama.
Noteworthy semi-finals from the last half-dozen years, meanwhile, have included Italy's thrilling win over Germany in the 2006 World Cup – and Germany's equally entertaining victory over Turkey in the European Championships two years later – Internazionale overcoming Barcelona, despite Sergio Busquets' comedy cheating, in the 2010 Champions League, the United States ending Spain's three-year-old, 35-game unbeaten run at the 2009 Confederations Cup, Stoke City's defenestration of Bolton at Wembley last year, an astonishing second leg between Burnley and Tottenham in the 2009 Carling Cup, and many more besides.
The semi-finals this week have given us at least one match to add to that list, but in truth these two games are destined to be remembered as a pair: Tuesday night and Wednesday, Barcelona and Real Madrid, Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo, who find themselves thrown together once more, in failure's cold and unfamiliar embrace. Read More
انسخ الكود التالى و ضعه فى موقعك او مدونتك.
