You can never be all that surprised when a team reverts to type. Yes, Real Madrid was fresh on the heels of the best week in its short history, having sealed two huge, potentially fate-altering wins. Nevertheless, this is still Real Madrid—talented but bumbling, ineptly managed, devoid of ambition, and disappointing as a rule. If the shock Clásico victory over the weekend, and the preceding 2-0 home win in the first leg of the Champions League quarterfinal tie against Arsenal, made for Real’s Cinderella moment, then the opening whistle of Wednesday’s followup match in London marked the arrival of midnight. Alessia Russo and her teammates were ready with the sledgehammers.
What has to be so dispiriting for Madrid fans about Wednesday’s commanding 3-0 Arsenal win is how perfectly it encapsulated the Bad Old Madrid, the one you would’ve hoped the prior two games had put an end to. The gameplan was typically atrocious. Sitting on a 2-0 lead from the first leg, you could forgive Las Blancas for entering the match with a single-minded focus on defending. And while Real did indeed evince a total lack of interest in doing anything productive with the ball, they somehow still managed to be horribly open defensively.
Arsenal wingers Caitlin Foord and Chloe Kelly had a field day sprinting up and down the wide areas of the pitch almost entirely unencumbered. Real’s full backs weren’t helped at all by the curiously attack-minded starting lineup, which placed a pair of defensively disinterested wingers (Linda Caicedo and Athenea del Castillo) in front of them. Unsurprisingly, this led to a constant stream of 1-v-1s and even 2-v-1s whenever the Gunners worked the ball wide.
Real’s left flank in particular was a sieve through which Arsenal sent wave after wave after wave after wave of attacks, especially in 15-minute second-half flurry that saw them score all three of their goals. It did not seem to me a coincidence that Sunday’s uncharacteristically stout Merengue defensive showing did not from the start include Olga Carmona, probably Europe’s single most overrated player, who defensively makes Trent Alexander-Arnold look like Paolo Maldini by comparison. Sure enough, with every raking Leah Williamson pass out to Kelly, Arsenal had in Carmona a trampoline to catapult themselves into the final third. Manager Alberto Toril, exhibiting the kind of glass-eyed passiveness everyone has come to expect, waited until the 76th minute to attempt to stop the bleeding by subbing Yasmim on for Carmona. By then it was too late.
With so much space out wide and between/behind Madrid’s back line—”line” implies too much coordination; it was more like a back squiggle—it made sense that Arsenal’s weapon of choice was the cross. For the first 45 minutes, though, it seemed like this cross-heavy approach might prove faulty. The Gunners had no trouble bombing down the flank and hooking in inviting crosses, but they were missing the kind of no-nonsense box-crashers who could make the most out of those chances. Of the 20 crosses the team lumped in in that first half, only four found a teammate. What Arsenal needed was a penalty-box killer. Luckily, they have a striker who can be pretty much whatever she wants to be.
Alessia Russo is an exquisite soccer player. She has a dizzying array of talents, and is the kind of forward who is so integrated into her team’s play that she always shines regardless of whether or not she gets on the scoresheet. She excels at the thankless—hold-up play, channel running, pressing—but where she really wows is with the spectacular: defender-hoodwinking controls, slippery dribbles, line- and squiggle-breaking through balls, backheels. If there’s one thing holding her back from true superstardom, it’s her scoring inconsistency. It’s not that she’s a bad finisher, but more that she sometimes is so eager to contribute to the construction of plays outside of the box that she’s not in position to convert the opportunities she helps the team create. The ideal Russo would be one who not only can but does do it all, at times dropping deep or charging wide to play the helper, but also remembering to lurk around the penalty spot to play the huntress.
Coming out of halftime with all of the momentum but without yet any goals, Arsenal needed that predator version of Russo, and she assumed the role with aplomb. Along with terrorizing Real’s center backs with pressure, the English striker made a point to stay high and centrally in possession, focusing her attacking efforts on getting on the end all those killer crosses that went begging in the first half. The opening goal came just seconds after the game resumed after the break, with Russo racing onto the umpteenth Kelly ball from out wide and slapping it into the net. Though it technically only halved Real’s aggregate advantage, it had the feel of a winner. It only took three minutes for Kelly to tear through Carmona’s flank yet again and send another ball into the box, where Mariona Caldentey, aided by a useful pick set by a box-lurking Russo, nodded home the tie-equalizing goal. Ten minutes after that, Russo’s savvy placement in the heart of the box saw a knocked-down header fall to her, and she quickly slashed her foot through the ball, completing Arsenal’s comeback.
If the first goal, and all the evidence that Real’s fairy dust had run out and the team had return to its meek norm, gave the prospect of an Arsenal win an air of inevitability, Russo’s second goal gave the prospect of a hat trick a similarly inevitable feeling. Russo indeed did put the ball into the back of the net two more times, though each strike was ruled out for being offside. Arsenal though never doubted that victory was assured, and continued to pile on the pressure instead of turtling up to protect its lead. Outside of a late scare from one menacing Caicedo run in stoppage time, Las Blancas never seemed like they had an equalizer in them. And so it is Arsenal that has gone through to the semifinals, where they will face Lyon.
In terms of raw talent, there’s not all that much that separates the squads of Arsenal and Real Madrid. What made the difference on this night was faith, commitment, good game-planning, and an environment that felt both demanding and supportive. More than 22,000 fans were in attendance in the Emirates Stadium to spur on a team—led by new coach Renée Slegers, who got the job when Arsenal (belatedly) fired its underperforming previous manager back in October—they have come to expect a lot from. Playing games in the big stadium, axing coaches who aren’t performing, believing in the team and inspiring the players to believe in themselves—there’s a lot Real could take from this tie, if they are willing to learn.
