Real Madrid win Champions League as Vinícius Júnior strike sinks Liverpool
Vinícius Junior’s goal saw Real Madrid extend its record for victories in European soccer’s biggest game. The final’s kickoff was delayed more than 30 minutes because of chaotic scenes at the overcrowded stadium gates.
Deep down, Real Madrid does not believe in magic. Or, rather, it does not only believe in magic. It might have spent much of the last three months apparently touched by some golden light, its run to the Champions League final a dream of stirring comebacks and insurmountable odds and impossible triumphs.
Those triumphs, against Paris St.-Germain and Chelsea and Manchester City, might have seemed to prove that the ultimate victory in this competition is Real Madrid’s irrevocable destiny, that it is driven by some elemental, unstoppable force, one that defies rational explanation and brooks no resistance.
Real Madrid beat Liverpool, 1-0, on Saturday in Paris with a performance of ruthless efficiency, of meticulous organization, of clinical obduracy. To do so, it required not only a single goal, scored by Vinícius Junior, but really only a single attack, a single move, a single chance.
It leaned, it is true, reasonably heavily on its goalkeeper, Thibaut Courtois, in those fleeting moments when Liverpool — another team in possession of a very particular sense of its own destiny — seemed to be gathering a head of steam. But it is one of soccer’s most cherished misapprehensions that having a good goalkeeper is just another form of luck.
They are part of the team, too, after all; to beat Real Madrid, it is necessary to beat Courtois, and the reason the former is so difficult is that the latter, at times, appears to skirt the impossible. Real Madrid could risk absorbing pressure, conceding chances, safe in the knowledge that Courtois is a redoubtable last line of defense.
