It’s been a tough night for Liverpool. Jurgen Klopp wanted them to play brave, big balls football – and they did, dominating the match until Mo Salah’s heartbreaking injury after half an hour. That changed the mood of the match, and then poor Loris Karius made a big, big balls of the second half to give away two goals either side of Gareth Bale’s staggering overhead kick. By the end of the night it felt that whatever Gareth Bale tried in this Champions League final would find the back of the Liverpool net, and even if what he attempted was not good enough then it would be Loris Karius’ misfortune to help it on its way.
This was the fourth Champions League final of Bale’s five years at Real Madrid, but the first in which he upstaged everyone, including Cristiano Ronaldo on the kind of night that is supposed to belong to Ronaldo. The first of the two goals the substitute scored was an overhead kick good enough to win any one of the 13 European Cup finals in which Madrid have now triumphed, and the second was part of the other story of the night that ended so differently. Karius had the kind of night that a goalkeeper will never be able to forget and as he later sobbed in front of the Liverpool end, trying to express his sorrow for two terrible errors you wondered at how long the young German’s career will take to recover. He had thrown a ball against Karim Benzema’s foot for Madrid’s first goal and flapped in the second of Bale’s which was struck from 40 yards by Bale in the firm belief that whatever by that point he did would turn to gold. It would have been hard for Liverpool to win this final with a goalkeeper as lost as Karius was, but it was even harder without Mohamed Salah, their goal machine taken out of the final by a first half entanglement with Madrid’s great cynic-in-chief, Sergio Ramos. Jurgen Klopp stopped short of blaming the Madrid captain for a wrestle that ended with Salah thrust down hard onto his neck and shoulder with the arm that should have broken his fall locked in by Ramos.
The Egyptian left the pitch in tears on just half an hour and he seemed to know then what Klopp confirmed later, that the injury was “really serious” and could cost him a place at the World Cup finals. Ramos was not even booked and we will never know if he could have foreseen what would happen but there was no question that he held onto Salah long after the Liverpool man was going down at a precipitous angle, slammed into the pitch.
