The grandees will repeat the final – Newspaper Kommersant No. 32 (7477) of 21.02.2023

Today, in the first matches of the 1/8 finals of the Champions League, Liverpool, which this season does not look as good as it should have looked, takes on Real Madrid, which has become almost a shadow favorite of the main European Cup, Napoli ”on the road meets with Eintracht.

The confrontation between Liverpool and Real Madrid is a terribly intriguing story. This is despite the fact that a superficial glance easily determines the obvious favorite in it. And this, of course, is the current owner of the main European Cup. In this sense, everything is completely different than it was in May 2022 before the Paris final of the previous Champions League. In it, Real Madrid defeated the Liverpool team – 1: 0, but the English club was quoted higher.

It’s all about Liverpool. Before the season, many saw in him, perfectly equipped, showing a very fresh game, a club that could become almost a football standard. But the reality does not meet expectations at all. Liverpool are lucky to have Chelsea in the Premier League, which neither huge investments nor flashy acquisitions help to get out of a deep hole. Londoners confidently hold the title of the most troubled club, not even the English Premier League (EPL), but the entire “big five” and divert attention to themselves. But in fact, Liverpool do not perform much better in the national championship. Chelsea are currently in tenth place, Liverpool are in eighth. And it looks like a disaster too.

But, looking deeper, you can find a fairly significant difference between today’s Chelsea and today’s Liverpool. With Londoners, everything is obvious: there is no style, no points. With Liverpool, the situation is much more ambiguous. According to some stats that illustrate potential, such as the number of chances created, Liverpool are either in the top three in their league, or close to it. And his disruptions are usually the result of extravagance, which for some reason this season is the Achilles’ heel of a chic Liverpool attack and has not gone away even after Cody Gakpo was bought as part of the winter transfer window to help Mohammed Salah and Darwin Nunez. However, it is known that such problems sometimes disappear on their own for powerful teams, disappear without a trace, like a painful abscess – you just need to catch the wave.

Another nuance is even more important. Liverpool’s lagging behind the zone in which the struggle for awards is carried out is largely due to constant misfires in matches with teams of lower status, those that are harder to tune in to. But in matches with a loud “billboard”, against the giants, he feels, oddly enough, much more comfortable. Here is a list of his scalps taken during the season in different competitions. Liverpool have beaten both Ajax and Manchester City twice, Napoli and Tottenham Hotspur once. He approached the game with Real Madrid, confidently – with a score of 2: 0 – having dealt with Newcastle on Saturday. And he actually fights quite at the level of giants now.

At the same time, there is good reason to doubt the stability of his next opponent, no matter how powerful he may seem. Here the calendar acts as the X-factor. At Real Madrid, he is not tough this season, but cruel. For him, the Liverpool match is the 37th in a few months. And this is not counting the Qatari World Cup, where the players representing Madrid in different national teams had an enormous load (all together they spent more than 3.5 thousand minutes at the championship). At the same time, before the start of the play-offs of the Champions League, Real Madrid had to make a narrow-minded, but still quite exhausting trip to Morocco for the Club World Cup.

This calendar has already annoyed the club. Recently, the list of injured Real Madrid players has been taking up a couple of lines all the time. Eder Militan, Ferland Mendy, Toni Kroos, Eden Hazard, Lucas Vazquez are or have just been in it. Nothing was reported about Karim Benzema’s injury, but he missed Saturday’s meeting in the Spanish championship with Osasuna, which ended in a 2-0 victory for the giant, due to “discomfort”.

And it must be taken into account that the application of Real Madrid is made up of half veterans, and there are only a few hard-core football players like Vinicius in it. So, apparently, it can “cover” the team at any time.

The second match of the day is of interest to everyone primarily because of Napoli. This season, he plays in such a way that the label of the shadow favorite of the champions is glued to him without any difficulties. The gap from the closest pursuer in the Italian championship – Inter – has already reached one and a half dozen points, among the elite forwards of the best European leagues, only Erling Haaland can compete with Victor Osimhen in terms of efficiency, and Khvich Kvaratskhelia has turned from a young talented dribbler into a full-fledged one in six months. heir to Diego Maradona”, “Quaradon”, who, if necessary, scores by slipping with the ball half of the field, stuffed to the top with opponents.

With the actual form of the Neapolitans, too, everything is in perfect order. Before the clash with Eintracht, they have a series of seven wins in the domestic championship. And of these seven matches, only the one in which Napoli fought Roma was not easy for him. And on the way to glory for the Neapolitan team is a club for which, strictly speaking, getting into the play-offs of the Champions League is a huge achievement and which is sixth in the German championship. The layout of the pair is crystal clear.

Alexey Dospekhov