especially the commentary.
Apparently it was the 15th time Real Madrid had won the European Cup/Champions League just in case you didn’t catch one of the 346 times it was mentioned as they beat a Dortmund side that rued their spurned chances.
The ball was there for Dortmund, over or through the defence and they were in, when they bothered playing it and weren’t fannying about at the back but it’s just they couldn’t finish it off, taking the wrong decisions or just being poor with the final effort, when they weren’t offside.
While the Germans were looking dangerous, Real were looking toothless. Vinicius Jr. was doing all the work. Such a refreshing change to see a winger knock the ball past his defender then run by them instead of this highly irritating modern routine of running into the defender, because you have to beat him one on one. See dolts like Grealish and Sterling. It’s just there was no one there for him to cross the ball to. Rodrygo was absent for the game, while Saint Jude of Bellingham was rolling around and moaning at the ref instead of being there.
No target man, like Dortmund, bleeding obvious from the off but somehow it took Ally McCoist about 38 minutes to notice it and yet we are told he’s such a great commentator. I mean it’s not like he was quiet for most of those 38 minutes, hell he wasn’t quiet for the whole damn game, and when he was that clown Fletcher was just regurgitating facts and figures. Yes, we know how many times they’ve won it, we knew before the first time you mentioned it, we certainly know after the 1one hundred and fiftieth time this half. It’s his routine, just like when he spoils an NFL game. It’s just facts and figures. God, it comes to something when you’re missing the US commentators for an NFL game, but that’s what he reduces you to.
So you knew that Dortmund would rue those spurned chances that had and would be punished and you knew they way they were fannying about at the back it would self inflicted.
It was a surprise that the opener would come from a Madrid corner. Dortmund looked better equipped to attack and defend corners but for all of them they had they never really looked like scoring from them, as they didn’t crowd the box, get in Courtois way or hit one of their own players.
So when one of the shortest players on the pitch – how many different pronunciations of Carvajal did McCoist come up with during the game? – came up with what was the winning header, it was a bit of a shock, though he was being marked at one point at the corner by Maatsen, who I’d been saying throughout was Dortmund’s weak link.
It was the right back that produced the coup de grace, when as predicted fannying about at the back he gifted the ball to Bellingham, who for once wasn’t greedy and passed it on to Vinicius. The Brazilian’s scuffer into the floor, which McCoist tried to claim was deliberate, sealed the deal. Of course he shouldn’t actually have been on the pitch, as an awful dive in the first half should have seen him receive his second yellow but of course that was never going to happen. You know a couple of seconds with VAR, easy to see and then the Dortmund defender wouldn’t have had a yellow card for complaining.
So a bit of a nothing final – no matter what the two rabbiting dillops in the commentary booth were telling us ad nauseam. Nobody really shone, as it finished I wondered how the English media would manage to give man-of-the-match to St Jude. As Ancelotti quietly went on picking up trophies.