Russian winters may be brutal, but it's the springs that are deadly.
Much has been made in the run up to Wednesday's Champions League final — an epic win for Manchester United over Chelsea in penalty kicks — about this being the 50th anniversary year of the Munich disaster. But for the Russians, hosting the finale, a grimmer anniversary was better remembered. This happens to be, almost to the day, the 65th anniversary of the most dogged and brutal fighting the world has ever seen.
We are blessed that football has replaced war for many of us across the globe. It's no accident that we use the lexicon of the military to talk about the game. When we speak about football, we talk of attrition, thrusts and feints, offense and blood. We speak of passion, a word that has no fixed meaning in this era of big money in the sport, and we speak of sacrifice.
So, it was apt that our modern war, fought with boots and a ball, found its showcase in late-night Moscow, with the two most modern teams showing a little bit of what the future of the game might look like.
And yet, here in this future the result turned out to be akin to so many in the past. As with many games between equals, the outcome of this game will be debated for a long time. For there was no clear winner, just a victor chosen by the gamble that is penalty kicks.
Penalty kicks are the cruelest and most unsatisfying tiebreaker in all of sport. They devalue the game that preceded it, for so often they don't reflect much more than the equality of the opponents.
The truth that will not be reflected by the tie-breaker is that tonight's game was trench warfare, dogged and hard-fought. Predictably rugged and close, it was also a final full of spirit that served to be a fitting capstone to an excellent European season. So many finals in this sport are anticlimactic because of the pressure, with no side willing to concede ground for fear of giving up a costly mistake. This, instead, was a thriller that happened to have to go to the sport's equivalent of a coin toss.
For long stretches, this was a match of absorption and clearance, an illustration of how central defense has become at the top levels of the sport. It must be stressed that what was on display was not the catenaccio of the 1960s. The modern defense is the hardwood-born full-court press, a system that aims to compress the field forward, but is vulnerable to attacks up the flanks. And yet, no defense can eliminate the errors, and it is the mistake that makes a winner.
One blunder was made by Didier Drogba, ejected with five minutes to go after he was seen slapping Nemanja Vidic after a heated argument broke out over what seemed like nothing after Carlos Tevez had apparently riled Chelsea players by not giving the ball back to them following an injury stoppage, but rather putting it into touch.
If, as is widely thought, this was Drogba's last game in a Chelsea uniform, it was a disgraceful finale to what has been a remarkable career in London. Chelsea was only reduced to ten men for about five minutes, but that straight red card took a key penalty-kick taker out of Avram Grant's lineup.
Another was made by United's most valuable player, Cristiano Ronaldo. The man who raised his haul to 42 goals on the season with a sublime opener, missed the most critical kick of the season, his infamous stutter-step not enough to fool the great Petr Cech. Yet another was made by John Terry, who slipped as he took what would have been the winning penalty kick to put it wide.
But the man who made no mistake, of course, was Edwin van der Sar. It took one second to palm away Nicolas Anelka's attempt, and one second to secure a deserved European Cup. Manchester United had shown all year long that they were a team built to raise this trophy, and they did not disappoint.
The first mistake in the match didn't even seem like one — a knock of heads. But there was no small irony in the fact that it was Paul Scholes, bloodied in his tangle with Claude Makelele in the 20th minute, who lead United to the breakthrough.
Stuffed with gauze and deep in enemy territory, Scholes' double give and go with Wes Brown finally collapsed the right flank of Chelsea, allowing Brown to float a dipping cross to the forehead of Ronaldo, who had been making sport of flummoxing Michael Essien. Ronaldo headed the ball home past a rooted Cech, and what had been until that point a game of flying bodies and stultifying marking, sprang to life.
Chelsea mounted an immediate reply, with Michael Ballack getting the best chance to level with a fierce header over a grasping Rio Ferdinand that Edwin van der Sar had to work hard to keep out. But in retrospect, Chelsea's best reply came from their keeper, who in the space of six seconds made two remarkable stops to keep his team in the game.
Wayne Rooney's long pass forward in the 35th initially looked hopeful, then long, and then deadly, finding Ronaldo again away from Essien. Ronaldo was then able to cross the ball to a wide-open Tevez, whose header was punched free by Cech. But Terry cleared the ball right to the feet of Michael Carrick, forcing Cech to make a save springing from his knees. Tevez would wholly miss his next chance, another deadly ball from Rooney, and with that, the momentum started to swing.
Leaving two goals on the table is something no aspiring champion can do, and Chelsea made United pay. Until the final minute of the first half, Frank Lampard had been silenced. Yet, as so often, he was in the right place to poach the equalizer after Vidic touched Essien's shot onto Ferdinand's back, and down to the Chelsea Englishman's waiting feet inside the area. Van der Sar slipped, but there was no hope of saving that shot, from that distance.
Both sides know each other too well, and as the game inched on after the restart, the nicks on the heels grew sharper, and the shoves and slaps off the ball grew harder. Both Ferdinand and Florent Malouda went down injured, halting play for short periods. The surface, a Slovakian import laid two weeks ago, began to break apart, and footing became more treacherous as the football became much more conservative.
The rain that had soaked Moscow the day before began again in earnest, soaking and sapping both teams. United's Rooney grew quiet, Tevez struggled to keep his footing, and slowly, Chelsea began to force United into some chaos, raising the tempo of the match and forcing Scholes and Owen Hargreaves to cover more and more ground. Yet United held: the only legitimate effort of the second half, for either side, was a rocket in the 77th minute for Drogba that hit the post
Deadlocked at full time, both teams struggled to keep up with a game that was increasingly being played in the middle of the pitch. There were bends, but no breaks. Lampard rattled what might have been the winner off the crossbar only two minutes into extra time; Ryan Giggs had a sure goal nodded over the bar by a cool Terry at the tenth minute. In light of the denoument of the game, few will remember the moment. It's too soon to say whether Terry will be remembered as a great leader, and this game-saving moment — or if he will be treated as other infamous goats, such as David Beckham and Roberto Baggio were after mishaps at the spot.
A conceit before tonight's meeting was that Manchester United and Chelsea are English sides, two teams from the same country facing one another for the first time at this high a level. That's false — neither team is tied to just one country any more. Chelsea is a team owned by a Russian, starring players from the Czech Republic, Portugal and the Ivory Coast, and coached by an Israeli that just happens to be based in London.
Manchester United has aims of being the global brand of the game. Are these "English" teams? Perhaps, but in name only.
One of these days, these enchantingly polyglot clubs will be fully untethered from such quaint concepts, and float, dirigibles hovering over the trenches and plains of world football. Perhaps when that happens, football's minders can come up with a more satisfying way to decide a champion.
And still, tonight in Moscow, perhaps we saw a glimpse of what that future will look like.
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