8 1GG Saturday May 28 2022 | the times
thegame
On the nights leading up to the very
first European Cup final, the
champions of Spain wondered if the
new tournament was being given the
importance it deserved. They were
staying in a handsome château just
outside Paris, but there were not quite
enough rooms. The kitman slept in an
outhouse. The team’s main man,
Alfredo Di Stéfano, suspected it
usually served as a kennel.
Come the 1956 final, Real Madrid
looked immediately out of their
depth. Their opponents at the Parc
des Princes, Stade de Reims, went 2-0
up after ten minutes. What followed
was everything that Uefa could have
dreamt of to galvanise its novel cup:
epic ebb and flow; a superstar
performer in Di Stéfano; terrific
suspense. It finished 4-3 to Real. The
losing side had held a lead for longer
than the winners, Madrid coming
back from 2-0, then 3-2.
The competition would be a huge
success, just about bearing its
transformation into the swollen beast
for the richest clubs from the stronger
domestic leagues has waned with new
formats designed to assist them.
In the era of one champion per
country, it was more brutal. When
Real Madrid returned to Paris for a
final, in 1981, they had gone 15 years
without getting so far. The way elite
football was played had altered, and
wild scorelines were rarer. So was the
magnetism of Madrid in the transfer
market. The side that took on
Liverpool had two distinguished
foreign players — the England winger
Laurie Cunningham and the German
midfielder Uli Stielike — but, man for
man, faced a club of greater pulling
power and with a more finessed
formula for European success.
“It was a poor game,” according to
Vicente Del Bosque, who played for
Real in that final, and later coachedthem. The pitch bore scars from a
rugby final at the Parc des Princes
four days earlier. Real felt like
underdogs, mindful they were up
against a side chasing a third title in
five years and with some potent
matchwinners. “I want you to mark
[Kenny] Dalglish so tight you follow
him to the toilet if necessary — and
you can flush it for him too,” the Real
coach, Vujadin Boskov, told José
Antonio Camacho. Liverpool’s
unexpected matchwinner was Alan
Kennedy, the left back.
It would be a further 17 years until
Real reached another final — a 1-0
victory over Juventus — and 19
before, back in Paris and on the
smoother surface of the Stade de
France, they approached one with
something like their old, entitled
swagger. That owed as much tohistory as form. They had finished
fifth in the 1999-2000 Liga, two places
behind fellow finalists Valencia.
Madrid won 3-0, ushering in a high-
spending strategy to build a 21st-
century version of those imperial
1950s. After Paris 2000, they broke
the world-record transfer fee in
successive summers. As with Kopa in
1956, they targeted the era’s standout
French footballer: Zinédine Zidane
scored the winning goal at the end of
his first Madrid season to deliver the
2002 European Cup, the club’s ninth.
To win on Saturday, in Madrid’s
fourth Paris final, would mean title
No 14 and a temptation to see this
latest clutch of titles as a mirror to the
dominant early epoch. It would be
five in nine seasons, not the clean
sweep of the initial years but then the
Champions League is a tougher beast
than the first European Cups. It
would be a Champions League seized
without the principal driver of the
previous four, Cristiano Ronaldo,
though he has been missed less since
Karim Benzema started showing he
can be as adept at choreographing a
comeback as Di Stéfano was.
Just as in 1956, Madrid wanted to
return from France this weekend with
the silverware and with a signed-up
French star. They imagined Kylian
Mbappé would be joining until, a
week ago, he committed to three
more seasons at PSG. His decision
feels like an affront to the institutional
grandeur Madrid have been selling to
potential recruits since they
persuaded Kopa to believe in it and,
in his and their first final, teased him
into thinking Madrid might be a little
flaky, liable to concede two goals in
ten minutes. They then showed him
how to mount a comeback.POPPERFOTO/GETTY IMAGESReal Madrid
celebrate their
victory in the
inaugural final
of 1956, also
held in Parisof the next century, doing so partly
because it preserved aspects of its
origin story. Real Madrid still do
improbable comebacks — ask Paris
Saint-Germain, Chelsea or
Manchester City — and they still use
the European Cup as a way to access
players they want to recruit.
In 1956, they came back to Spain
with both the trophy and the star of
French football. The lead-up to the
first of Real’s four Paris finals had
been crowded with behind-the-scenes
transfer talks, AC Milan and Real
presenting rival offers to the Reims
forward Raymond Kopa.
Kopa chose Madrid, little
suspecting it meant boarding the
European Cup express, To his 1956
silver medal with Reims he added
golds from the next three finals. Real
Madrid won it again in 1960, by which
time Ferenc Puskas had joined.
No club have since strung together
as many as five European Cups. Uefa
is grateful for that. Their Big Cup, a
pure knockout for most of its life until
it became the Champions League,
thrives because of its relative
competitiveness, albeit the jeopardyHow Real always
seem to sizzle
when it’s Paris
IAN HAWKEY