City's system failure offers glimmer of hope to rivals

Real Madrid's collision with Pep Guardiola's grooved machine represented a gripping clash of ideologies

- Barney Ronay

It turns out Pep Guardiola was right after all. Manchester City's pursuit of the double treble will now remain "a hypothetical dream". This was Pep's own excellent phrase before Wednesday's second leg against Real Madrid, a formulation that suggests even Guardiola's dreams are full of theory, algebra, hypotheticals, like a footballing version of Evelyn Waugh's Professor Silenus, the modernist architect who doesn't sleep but instead lies in the dark for eight hours with his eyes shut doing high-speed calculations, before rising at dawn to design another machine-age masterpiece.

And City versus Real Madrid (1-1 aet, 4-4 on aggregate, pens 3-4) was a masterpiece in many ways. This was a game that felt for long periods like two teams falling asleep with their hands around each other's throats. But it was also utterly gripping, all subtext, all narrative, a game that seemed, even in its more painful repetitions, to be telling us something important.

First of all, for the neutral it is surely a good thing that City will not win a second successive treble. It would be easy to gloss this by pointing out that watching anyone win an unprecedented double-treble would be a tedious and stratifying spectacle. But it is doubly true in this case.

It is a mark of where we are that victory for Real Madrid, in a competition created by money, out of money, for the future benefit of money, could ever be styled as a win for the little man. There are plenty of City fans who would see their team as self-evidently the underdogs in this company, although it takes a degree of cognitive dissonance to genuinely believe it.

It is worth remembering what the City project is for. This remains at bottom a public relations exercise staged by a sovereign state with a questionable human rights record, but intent on building a post-carbon economy.