Manchester City pulverizes Real Madrid and joins Inter Milan in the final – Release

An overflown first period, a controlled second, Manchester City wrote one of its most beautiful European pages by leaving the defending champion, Real Madrid of Karim Benzema, in the semi-final of the Champions League, Wednesday May 17 ( 4-0, go 1-1). The English club join Inter Milan in the final on June 10 in Istanbul and will be looking to claim a trophy they lost at this stage of the competition to Chelsea in 2021.

In the meantime, no one knows what Pep Guardiola’s dreams are made of, but there’s every reason to believe that City’s first 45 minutes at the Etihad looked like it. Rarely have we seen Real so tossed about, helpless, cornered on his goal and the statistics were there to give the measure of English hyper-dominance. With 70% possession, never, even against much weaker opponents, had City had so much possession in the first half of a Champions League match.

Real had then only touched 10 balls in the opposing half, when City had 196. It was even all the more remarkable that the Norwegian cyborg Erling Haaland once again remained silent against goalkeeper Thibaut Courtois who was the only Madrilenian to survive in this shipwreck.

But the Portuguese Bernardo Silva took Courtois on the wrong foot to open the scoring (1-0, 23rd), before the former Monegasque doubled the lead a quarter of an hour later after a new attack worthy of a table black. Madrid player Eder Militao, against his camp (76th), and Julian Alvarez (91st) completed the great success.

“A year of suffering”

This 4-0 is a good reflection of the chasm between a Real which seemed worn out and a City which is walking on water at the end of the season. “I had the feeling that we had to take a year of suffering after [la défaite face au Real] from last year, recalled Manchester City manager Pep Guardiola. It had been so painful, when people had criticized the lack of personality of the players. A year later, we are once again showing how special this group of players is.”

In this year of suffering, it’s unclear if Pep Guardiola was also thinking about the Premier League’s accusations targeting the richest club on the planet for failing to uphold Financial Fair Play. The body pointed to a hundred offenses committed by the Mancunian club over the period from 2009 to 2018. Accusations which came three years after UEFA had suspended the Mancunian club from the Champions League for two years for not having complied with the rules of financial fair play, by overestimating his sponsorship income between 2012 and 2016. Decision overturned by the Court of Arbitration for Sport.