Real Madrid visited Manchester City on Tuesday night, in the first leg of their Champions League semifinal. But where the sight of a sold-out Etihad stadium waving giant blue-and-silver tinfoil flags while booing the Champions League anthem promised something exciting, the game itself entirely failed to deliver. It was flat. It was dull. It was, not to put too fine a point on it, a load of toss.
The best thing about Manchester City vs. Real Madrid was the yellow cards
There wasn’t much soccer, but there were three wonderful bookings.
Paul Gilham/Getty Images
“Toss,” in this context, is not a rude word but an acronym, standing for “tense, or something similar.” This is how such games are generally explained away after the event; after all, it would be a bit embarrassing if a game as important and glamorous and money-drenched as this one turned out to be, well, toss. But even the tossiest toss [please stop writing “toss” now — ed.] contains traces of non-toss [seriously — Ed.], and though the football wasn’t up to much, the bookings were exemplary. There were three, each perfect in their own way. And in the absence of anything else to celebrate, and because the thought of writing about Joe Hart is faintly disquieting, let’s celebrate them here.
The First Yellow
It was Pepe. Of course it was Pepe. No odds were offered; no alternatives considered. But luckily for Real Madrid, this was Good Pepe, the Pepe who knows where the line is, finds it as soon as possible, and then stays just to the right side of it for the rest of the game. He doesn't behave, not as such, but he misbehaves far enough and no further. He asks the ref to book opponents; he doesn't tell them to. He smiles; he doesn't snarl. He muscles and struggles and clips and grapples and even occasionally defends, but he doesn't lose control.
Back to the booking. They don't put this sort of thing in textbooks, but this was a textbook foul: as un-dangerous and non-reckless as a fully committed slide tackle can be, and absolutely guaranteed to stop the player. Down went Pepe, over went Manchester City's attacker, along came the referee and out came the yellow card. And Pepe nodded and smiled and shook the official's hand. Professional bastard-at-the-back recognises professional bastard-in-the-black. Except the referee was actually wearing red, with little navy epaulettes. Modern football is simultaneously rubbish and adorable.
The Second Yellow
It is one of the basic principles of visual comedy: Something small juxtaposed with something big is always mildly amusing. Think Groot and Rocket Raccoon; think Peter Crouch and Shaun Wright-Phillips; think Fezzik fighting Westley in The Princess Bride. Or think David Silva on Tuesday night.
David Silva is a small man, and he looks — with his wispy, patchy beard, rounded shoulders and bathroom-mirror haircut — even smaller than he is. Gareth Bale, by contrast, is tall and strong, broad of shoulder and taut of buttock, blessed with thighs that wouldn't shame a hippo. If said hippo really worked out. Like, a lot. He positively quivers with physicality, as though his constituent molecules were somehow slightly denser than those of other, weaker humans. And where most footballers sleep in beds, Bale returns to his mansion in the suburbs of Madrid, removes all his clothes and stands on a marble plinth until morning returns. Probably.
Then David Silva tripped him over! It was so great. Of note, Silva hurt himself and had to leave the game.
The Third Yellow
Most yellows are disciplinary. A player does something, and the referee waves a small piece of coloured card in their face to let them know that this was a bad thing to do, and should they do it again then they can expect to be dismissed, or at the very least given a final warning, because consistency is one thing but ultimately we all just dream of a quiet life and nobody, not even the most masochistic of referees (and they’re all at least slightly masochistic, they have to be), likes to spend the next week avoiding the television and the radio and the newspapers because some jumped-up manager’s trying to divert attention away from his own inability to organise a back four by claiming the officials ruined the game.
Other yellows are transactional, a clear and obvious decision by a defender that the punishment is worth the crime. Most common is the late-game cynical foul, in which a defender, with the end of the game approaching and the outcome in the balance, defuses a dangerous situation by just grabbing onto a passing attacker and hauling him to the floor. We saw Ander Herrera pull one off in the FA Cup semifinal against Everton, hauling Ross Barkley to the ground, and we saw Dani Carvajal do something similar to Kevin De Bruyne last night. He nearly cocked it up, but he just managed to grab hold of a scrap of the slippery Belgian's undershirt, and down they both tumbled. Attack over, booking accepted and clean sheet maintained. Presumably, Pepe ran over and shook everybody's hand.
People hate the late-game cynical foul, and it’s easy to see why. It’s not a foul that comes from a miscalculation or an error in timing; rather, it emerges from the fact that a yellow card, as a punishment, depreciates in significance throughout the game. There comes a point where they are — suspensions for accumulation notwithstanding — essentially irrelevant. Carvajal went onto the list with just two minutes of the game remaining, most of which he knew he was going to spend standing in a defensive wall. It is, in one sense, not really football at all; it’s football impeded. Football exploited. Football rudely and cheaply interrupted.
But defending isn’t just about anticipation and marking and interceptions and really aggressive pointing. It’s about understanding football and its rules in all their multifaceted and inconsistent and occasionally nonsensical wonder. It’s about understanding where the weak spots are, and how to exploit them. And if the rules of football are such that defenders all get given silver bullets 10 minutes from time — except Pepe, because he’s Pepe and got booked in the 24th minute — then it would be embarrassing if defenders failed to use them. That truly would cheapen the whole business.
Ultimately, Carvajal was simply defending as the laws of football compelled him to defend. And though a goal might have been nice, it’s considerable compensation to see a defender stand over an attacker in the 92nd minute, look down at his impotently furious face and nod. For that nod contains the following: Them’s the breaks, mate, don’t look at me. Take it up with the linear nature of time. I couldn’t give a toss.
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