Liverpool v Tottenham: The different dimensions of one-country Champions League finals
The second all-Premier League final will be the seventh time the two Champions League finalists have hailed from the same league in the last 20 years
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The first time two English clubs met in the Champions League final, which also happened to be the last time, Michael Carrick fittingly did something he’d never done before. The Manchester United midfielder completely blanked all of the Chelsea players in the tunnel. Carrick wouldn’t usually have been one for friendly chat with opponents before any game, but this time there wasn’t even an acknowledgement for England teammates like Ashley Cole, or childhood friends from West Ham United like Frank Lampard. The game was just too big, too intense. Too different, and all because it was opposition they were so familiar with.
“Losing this final was not an option,” Carrick said of that 2008 showpiece, in his autobiography ‘Between the Lines’. Top professionals would of course say similar about every Champions League final, but it is a feeling that is so much more acute when it is against a team from the same country.
“No player likes it,” Santiago Canizares tells The Independent, the goalkeeper having played for Valencia against Real Madrid in the very first one-country final back in 2000. “You never like it, not in normal knock-outs, but especially not the final. It’s an international competition, and you prefer to play teams from other countries, but then you’re facing a side you know well.”
This season’s final will be the seventh one-country final in Champions League history, Liverpool manager Jurgen Klopp having already appeared in the fourth with Borussia Dortmund against Bayern Munich in 2013, Tottenham Hotspur’s Toby Alderweireld having played in the fifth for Atletico Madrid against Real Madrid the following year.
Everyone else at the Wanda Metropolitano on Saturday will have to adjust to the unique feel - and challenge - of this type of match. Perhaps the most immediate quirk is that this is the biggest game of most players’ careers, all because of the stage, the history and the continental dimension that affords it so much gravitas and mystique… and then you’re facing a side you meet all the time. “It almost makes it feel smaller,” Canizares says.
One-country Champions League finals
2000 Real Madrid 3-0 Valencia
2003 AC Milan 0-0 Juventus (Milan win 3-2 on penalties)
2008 Manchester United 1-1 Chelsea (United win 6-5 on penalties)
2013 Bayern Munich 2-1 Borussia Dortmund
2014 Real Madrid 4-1 Atletico Madrid
2016 Real Madrid 1-1 Atletico Madrid (Real Madrid win 5-3 on penalties)
But that in turn also makes the pressure greater. Challenges you know so well, and are so normal to you, suddenly take on an international and historic dimension that can alter everything about them. Many players confide they’d prefer to meet continental opposition, because it feels a freer hit. There’s no domestic league table to inform the game, not as many recent meetings to inform the game, not as many relationships to inform the game. A one-country final has all of this, as well as that extra layer of psychology.
The first thing playing on minds is something relatively simple. Good old-fashioned “bragging rights”, even if there’s obviously a bit more to it than that for those actually involved. The teams' many recent meetings, as well as where they have finished in the table, will at the very least dictate who should win. That will play on players' minds and will in turn frame the game.
It shouldn’t necessarily frame predictions. At least not going by precedence. Of the six previous one-country finals, three have been won by the team that finished higher in the domestic table (Real Madrid against Atletico in 2016, United and Bayern); three by the team that finished lower (Milan, Real Madrid against Valencia and Atletico in 2014).
The three victories by Real Madrid are perhaps most indicative, but of something else. In all of the one-country finals so far, the historically bigger team, with more European pedigree, has won. The single possible exception is the all-Italian final of 2003, but whereas Juventus were always undeniably the greater domestic side, they had a huge neurosis about the European Cup that Milan never had. Milan, as the second most successful side in the competition’s history, long saw it as their own as much as Real Madrid did. Atletico Madrid meanwhile had the misfortune of twice meeting the club they had a greater neuroses about than any other in their one-country - or, really, one-city - finals. They came up against a side that similarly just saw this stage as theirs as much as the trophy.
Valencia, the far superior Spanish side in 1999/2000, were all too aware of this belief in that season’s final when they met the same side.
“With Real Madrid, we knew that they were a team that raise it for finals. That relish finals.”
Valencia, however, visibly didn’t relish it.
“We could see they were more nervous than us,” Madrid’s starting 2000 centre-half Ivan Campo tells The Independent.
That’s putting it diplomatically. Ahead of what was Valencia’s first ever Champions League final, one Madrid player looked at how tense many of their players were in the tunnel, then turned to his teammates and said: “their legs are melting”. Many Madrid players already felt the trophy was theirs.
“All season they’d been thrashing everyone,” Steve McManaman said in his book on his time in Spain, ‘El Macca’. “But they didn’t turn up… the game, I’ve said a thousand times, felt very easy. Here we were on the biggest of stages, and it felt like a stroll.”
This perhaps points to one reason why the bigger club has generally won it, if that isn’t just coincidence, given three finals just went to penalties between evenly-matched teams. The big clubs are just all more used to it. Experience of such games radiates through them. That isn’t the only thing that’s common to them, either.
Before 2008, Sir Alex Ferguson told his United players that if they just played their way, they’d win. There was no overt fixation on Chelsea’s strengths, in the way there might have been if it was a foreign side.
It was the same with Bayern in 2013, when sporting director Matthias Sammer told the players not to worry about Dortmund, to just concentrate on playing to their potential.
There is that assurance to such clubs.
Klopp now finds himself on the opposite side of what he had in 2013. Those who know him say that while he will publicly insist the game is “50-50”, he will privately implore his Liverpool players that they will win if they just do it their way.
So while intricate tactical insight on the opposition is usually what elevates European ties, too much may well be counter-intuitive in one-country matches where the players already know the opposition so well. It can create a complex to go with the extra layer of psychology. You only have to ask Pep Guardiola about his last two eliminations with Manchester City, since this year’s finalists have both knocked him out.
“It’s strange,” Campo says. “It’s players you know so well, and a team you know so well, and that can influence you when this massive game kicks off. It can make you think a bit, maybe bring more second-guessing into it.”
Canizares concurs.
“With most Champions League matches, you’ve watched their last few games on analysis. With games like this, or 2000, you haven’t watched their last few games. You’ve watched their last 20 years!”
And that again brings it back to the extra layer of psychology, the tactical intrigue, as Klopp’s experience in 2013 arguably displayed better than any other. There was the rare - and almost one-off - potential for surprise.
That match had initially fallen into precisely the same pattern as all of the German sides' intensely close recent meetings. Bayern dominated the ball, Dortmund waited to pounce in dangerous areas. It made for, yes, another intensely close game that was at deadlock at 1-1.
That only changed when Javi Martinez dropped back between the centre-halves, won a few key tackles, and consequently altered the whole feel of the match. It was suddenly Bayern that were playing the transition game Dortmund usually did, and Klopp’s side couldn’t handle it. They didn't have a response. They were too used to playing a certain way. From there, the winning goal seemed a matter of time, and came from Arjen Robben in stoppage time
It’s arguable that, in the wider context of Dortmund-Bayern ties, that dynamic could only have worked once, because Klopp would have then adjusted. It just worked on the biggest stage, in their biggest game.
It all feeds into it with these fixtures, the more intimate knowledge of each other making every individual element so much more intense. When Didier Drogba got sent off in 2008, with a reckless decision that influenced the match and then the penalty shoot-out given he would have been one of the primary takers, some United players felt the Chelsea striker would not have reacted like that if he didn’t know the opposition so well.
That was part of the reason Carrick blanked Chelsea players. It was a mental trick to ensure this really didn’t feel like just another game against them, so he would perform to the level required.
It is all more for Klopp and Mauricio Pochettino to consider.
The greater knowledge of the opposition, in such a final, ironically gives them so much more to think about.
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