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It was only a small thing, and completely irrelevant to where this fantasy Champions League is headed now, but the hero on the day was Cypriot minnow APOEL’s Portuguese defender Paulo Jorge.
At this point, with Barcelona and Real Madrid headed toward the final on a collision course (with Chelsea and Bayern Munich playing the roles of semifinal speed bumps), it’s about to get arty.
The prospect of the two most storied, most talented and least amicable soccer clubs on Earth going at it on May 19 sends most of the world running to get on board the Sports Orgasmatron. It’s going to get hot in there. Bring a bathing suit.
If Real-Barca comes to pass, it will likely be the most watched event in world television history. Aliens who have been monitoring us since the Dark Ages will look up from their monitors and say the alien equivalent of “Something’s going down.”
Some — a very few — will resist the pull of history and magic. Every single member of that resistance will live on this continent.
Here’s a specific example — Mike Ulmer. You may know Mike from his thoughtful take on sports in newspapers and books. Now he puts on one of those tinted, pointy helmets in the morning and goes to work at the Death Star, where he writes about sports for MLSE.
Mike’s a pal and an aesthete. He appreciates beauty in all its sporting forms. Except soccer. He’s coming around slowly, but he’s down on it for one reason.
“Why do they have to fall down all the time?” Mike wondered to me in a pressbox somewhere. It was an honest question rather than the usual sneer.
I’m not sure, is the only good answer to that one. And I felt vaguely ashamed.
But now I will point Mike and the rest of the doubters in the direction of Paulo Jorge.
In Wednesday’s quarter-final against Real Madrid — a contest his team had absolutely zero chance of winning — Jorge lunged in for a 50/50 ball in the area. He knocked feet with Cristiano Ronaldo and spun away. Turning off-balance and out of control, he planted his face into the shoulder of a teammate.
Slow-mo replays showed a tooth popping out of Jorge’s mouth as he hit the deck. He lay there for a bit. Then he got up and walked over to his bench. While the medics crowded around, Jorge reached into his mouth and pulled out a second tooth and flung it to the ground.
Somewhere, a dentist was leaning into the TV, screaming, “Stick it back in!” Because — helpful Star hint — that’s what you should do when you knock out a tooth.
But as manly gestures go, it was appreciated. The sport needed a sacrifice.
“Why do they have to fall down all the time?”
“Ask Paulo Jorge.”
Now that he’s proved our point, we can resume normally scheduled falling down.
All four of the remaining teams in this competition are jammed to the gills with divers, whiners and assorted actors of pitch and screen.
They’re also quite good when they’re upright. We should concentrate on that part.
Of the two semis, the Barcelona-Chelsea tilt is the easier to predict. No other team has played this current incarnation of Barcelona — the world’s best-ever professional side — better than Chelsea.
But that was old, good Chelsea. On Wednesday, we saw new, bad Chelsea. They were lucky to slink by 10-man Benfica. Chelsea has no chance against the Catalans.
On the other end, it’s more competitive: Real Madrid vs. Bayern Munich. The final will be held in Munich, giving Bayern a morale boost (since millions and millions of dollars in salary isn’t enough).
That said, this is Real’s last real chance to dent this Barcelona team’s legend. It’s hard to believe they would let that slip by. More importantly, it would ruin my month of May and that of billions of other people. The world is a hard place. God can throw us a solid on this one.
If the hoped-for final comes to pass, it would not be hyperbolic to call it the most anticipated one-off contest in team sports history.
I’ll invite Mike over. You do the same for a doubter.
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