familiar smile. Cristiano Ronaldo – gelled
hair, dazzling teeth, magic in his boots –
will never forget the night he scored the
600th goal of an almost implausible
career.
It was the moment everyone knew the
Champions League trophy was on its way
back to the Bernabéu and, once again,
that the four-times Ballon d’Or winner
had left his imprint on another final.
Ronaldo had scored twice on another
exultant night when he also leapfrogged
Lionel Messi to announce himself as the
competition’s leading scorer for the fifth
season running. He will enjoy that, too,
but the real prize here was to be part of
a side that have now lifted European
football’s most coveted silverware three
times in four seasons. Cardiff 2017 will fit
neatly with Milan 2016 and Lisbon 2014
whereas, for Juventus, this was a familiar
story of regret and hurt.
This was their
seventh defeat out
of nine finals,
including five in a
row, and the second
half was a
chastening
experience for the
Serie A champions, culminating in them
sieving more goals in one match than in
the rest of the competition put together.
It was a full-on collapse and, by the end,
the players in black and white stripes
looked in need of smelling salts.
It was certainly rare to see a Juventus
team lose their way so badly bearing in
mind it was 1-1 at the break and, if
anything, Massimiliano Allegri’s players
had looked the more rounded side. Yet
the second half was a dreadful ordeal for
the team from Turin and all those
supporters who had held up thousands
of black and white cards before kick-off
to spell: “The Time is Now.” Yes, Juve
were unfortunate, in the extreme, with
the deflected goal from Casemiro that
gave Madrid a 2-1 lead just after the
hour. From that point onwards, however,
it was staggering to see a team renowned
for defensive structure crumple this way.
Juve’s indignities in that period also
featured a sending-off for Juan Cuadrado,
one of their substitutes, and a late goal
from Marco Asensio when the thousands
of Madridistas were already going
through their victory songs. Gareth Bale,
deemed too short of fitness to start, had
joined the party by that stage and no one
from Zinedine Zidane’s team should
really care that the game’s outstanding
moment was conjured up by one of the
losing players.
Mario Mandzukic’s goal was the paradox
of the night. Indeed, has there ever been
a better goal in a European final? Zidane
himself is on the all-time list for his
spearing volley against Bayer Leverkusen
at Hampden Park in 2002. Yet it is a
legitimate debate and Mandzukic’s 27th-
minute effort here might even edge it
given that it involved the ball going
between four different players without
touching the floor.
Leonardo Bonucci was first with a long,
diagonal pass out to Alex Sandro on the
left and, after that, it was a blur of
exhilarating speed, colour and
movement. Sandro’s cross to pick out
Gonzalo Higuaín was a beauty: a
cushioned, left-footed volley on the run.
Higuaín controlled the ball on his chest
and flicked it towards Mandzukic. And
then, finally, it was the big man’s turn,
teeing himself up and then twisting his
body to launch himself at the ball.
Volley, chest-volley, chest-volley: five
touches in total, mid-air; left, right, left
and right again. It was like something
from a computer game and, at the end of
it, Mandzukic’s improvisational shot was
dipping and swerving into the top corner
of Keylor Navas’s goal.
Ultimately, though, the more prosaic
goals carried the greater significance in
this contest. Madrid have managed only
one clean sheet on their way to winning
this competition. Yet there is another
statistic about Zidane’s team and the
player, more than anyone, who carries
the team’s dreams. They arrived in
Cardiff with the best goals record of any
side in the competition – 32 from 12 ties –
and Ronaldo, being Ronaldo, rarely lets a
big game pass him by without making
some kind of contribution.
To begin with, he
had found it difficult
to get too much of
the ball in and
around the Juve
penalty area. But he
also had periods in
the other finals
when he drifted to the edges. Then this
one reached its 20th minute and he came
alive, exchanging passes with the
overlapping Dani Carvajal before pulling
back his right boot to take aim. His shot
was low, directed towards the bottom
corner, and skimmed off Bonucci to
elude Gianluigi Buffon.
If we were to be kind about the losing
side, Madrid’s first two goals both came
from deflections and, in Casemiro’s case,
the trajectory of his shot completely
changed once the ball had struck Sami
Khedira. The truth, however, is that Juve,
having conceded only three goals en
route to this final, chose a bad night to
lose their defensive organisation and
never recovered from that moment.
Three minutes later, Luka Modric
scampered down the right, clipped a
cross to the near post and Ronaldo’s
clipped finish gave the remainder of the
match an air of inevitability. “The people
who always criticise Cristiano are going
to have put their guitar back in its case,”
he said afterwards, modest as ever.
There was still time for Sergio Ramos, as
devious as a bag of weasels, to help
engineer Cuadrado’s second yellow card
with a bout of pretend agony but
Madrid’s second-half performance had a
lot more good than bad. Marcelo set up
Asensio to sweep in their fourth goal in
the last minute and Zidane joined Brian
Clough, Sir Alex Ferguson, Pep Guardiola
and José Mourinho among others on the
list of managers who have won the
European Cup twice.
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