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While a church bell clanged intermittently and bits of tumbleweed blew across the pitch at the Emirates Stadium, the Allianz Arena hosted a ding-dong battle that pretty much had it all on Wednesday night. For the second evening in eight days, it was left to Bayern Munich and Real Madrid to pull out all the stops and provide the box-office entertainment as Arsenal once again Arsenaled their way past Sporting in a bore draw to earn their place in Bigger Cup semi-finals. More or less picking up where they’d left off at the end of the first leg, Bayern and Madrid served up a gourmand feast of slapstick goalkeeping, a see-sawing scoreline, much better goalkeeping, near-misses, goals of an at times absurdly high quality, several red cards and no end of post-match salty Spanish tears and recriminations. While Madrid have little or no chance of pipping Barça to this season’s La Liga title, they certainly thrashed them in the ungracious Bigger Cup exit stakes.
While their bitter Catalan rivals had some justification for complaining about assorted big decisions that didn’t go their way against Atlético 24 hours previously, Madrid’s post-match meltdown over the red card shown to Eduardo Camavinga when the tie was on a knife-edge resembled the kind of full-on collective tantrum thrown by a group of toddlers ordered to turn Bluey off and go to eat a big plate of vegetables. Already on a yellow card, Madrid substitute Camavinga stupidly delayed a restart. While the impression was conveyed that ref Slavko Vincic probably wouldn’t have issued the second yellow if he’d remembered he’d already cautioned the player, he was left with little or no option when assorted Bayern players enthusiastically reminded him through the medium of mime. Following Camavinga’s untimely exit, Bayern scored the decisive goals that settled the tie.
