Guardiola overthinks another big Champions League night as Valverde punishes Spursy City | OneFootball

It had already been a tough week for the ‘Premier League so strong’ crowd, but right up until this game we were ready to call out an over-reaction to an over-reaction.

Liverpool will probably still go through against Galatasaray. Arsenal will probably still go through against Bayer Leverkusen. Newcastle did themselves proud against Barcelona. And Spurs… well, we love Spurs.

Even Chelsea’s defeat in Paris had an air of freakery about it. But the ease and extent to which Real Madrid toyed with Manchester City on a night that could easily have finished even worse than a very bad 3-0 defeat for Pep Guardiola’s side is hard to ignore.

Anyone who watched the way Real Madrid laboured past Benfica in the punishment round would have given Los Blancos no chance of doing something like this.

But against a confused, disoriented and unbalanced City side they were magnificent, powered to a surely tie-settling victory by a Federico Valverde hat-trick to rank among the best you could ever wish to see.

Every bit of this was astonishing, but even more so for coming after an opening 15 minutes that promised a back-and-forth game between two giants given the openness and the way chances were being exchanged. For those 15 minutes Jeremy Doku looked all set to be the game’s most influential player.

That proved quite dramatically not to be the case.

Madrid’s opener in a statement win full of seemingly lost vim and swagger was a goal of deceptive simplicity, the platonic ideal of route one. Four touches took the ball from goalkeeper Thibaut Courtois’ feet to the back of City’s net, but every one of them was deliberate and calculated.

Courtois’ clearance was far more long pass than long ball, picking out Valverde’s run behind Nico O’Reilly perfectly. Valverde’s first touch took O’Reilly out of the equation and left Gianluigi Donnarumma with a decision to make. He opted to charge and lost his bearings and, briefly, his mind. As he slid across the greasy Bernabeu surface, he mistakenly believed he’d left the confines of his area and pulled his hand away as Valverde’s second touch knocked the ball past him.

It wasn’t the most embarrassing moment a slipping and sliding keeper has suffered in Madrid this week, but it’s not one Donnarumma will look back on with great fondness. There was still work to do, work Valverde did expertly to finish from a tight angle.

The second goal arrived less than eight minutes later, and would be made to look humdrum by the two either side of it. There was even here a hint of luck about how Vinicius Jr’s pass made its way into Valverde’s path to rifle across Donnarumma and into the bottom corner in Bale-versus-Inter style.

Valverde and Madrid saved the best for last. A sweeping counter-attack ended with Brahim Diaz dinking the ball in for Valverde to flick over Marc Guehi’s head with his first impeccable touch and find the bottom corner from close range with his second.

It was the first hat-trick of Valverde’s career, and few ever will have scored a better one on a bigger stage.

This was what we used to expect but simply didn’t tonight from a Real Madrid Champions League knockout performance. Back before the days when you could make them cower with a couple of Declan Rice free-kicks. Days we weren’t sure even still existed after what we’d seen from them recently.

Donnarumma at least stayed on the pitch after conceding three goals in quick succession, but was next seen conceding a penalty after more catastrophic City defending saw Vinicius Jr left to run through on goal.

In a moment that could still prove significant in a week’s time, Donnarumma redeemed himself ever so slightly with a fine save from a nonchalant penalty, Vini firming up our long-standing suspicion that no good can ever come from ostentatiously celebrating the mere award of a spot-kick. You do need to complete those formalities.

The game ended more in the style it had begun, and City could easily have taken a goal back with them that would have changed the whole complexion of the tie, most notably when O’Reilly – who had an otherwise thoroughly miserable evening – pounced on a defensive error and must have thought he’d scored before Courtois’ go-go-gadgeted a leg out to somehow preserve the three-goal lead.

City’s shape was generally better in the second half after Guardiola had performed all-too necessary corrective surgery at half-time.

Easy to say in hindsight but also not that difficult to say before that picking three wide forwards and an Erling Haaland might just have been a touch of overkill on Pep’s part. Doku, Savinho and Antoine Semenyo are all fine players, but there is no call to have all three of them on the pitch from the start of the first leg of a Champions League knockout tie away from home.

City inevitably benefited from the introduction of Tijjani Reijnders and the return to a more orthodox formation, but it’s hard to shake the notion that faced with a big Champions League night Guardiola has once again overthought and overcomplicated matters to grave cost.

They were better in the second half, but City never truly got back on an even keel. They were less dishevelled, less easily overrun, but still constantly vulnerable to Madrid’s counter-attacks while alarmingly indecisive and ineffective with their own attacks.

It did feel like City could have escaped Madrid with a 3-1 or even a 3-2 defeat, but also that it could have been 4-0 or 5-0 as well.

At which point it becomes hard to escape the conclusion that City are at this point not much more than a high-functioning Spurs. Individual errors, square pegs in round holes, a fair amount of slipping over, and a three-goal defeat in Madrid.

It’s an uncomfortable number of awkward comparisons to what is at this time the sport’s biggest punchline.