Real Madrid’s Champions League triumph reaffirmed their status as Europe’s sole superpower

Cardiff: Real Madrid were crowned European champions yet again after a comprehensive 4-1 victory in the Champions League final against Juventus. Cristiano Ronaldo scored a brace as Madrid became the first team to retain the trophy, in their 12th European Cup win. Here are the biggest talking points from the Champions League 2017 final:

Enticing game, not a classic final

It was brewing as the perfect storm with two giants of the European game, with different cultural identities and distinct philosophies, playing in a final of historic dimensions – Real Madrid’s double quest, Juventus’s treble obsession.

The Italians honored football’s finest virtues with a razor-sharp start. With all the tactical scheming, the final could have been a stalemate and 90 minutes of attrition, but from the onset Juventus showed great intensity, with plenty of box-to-box action. They wanted to attack, so much for all the talk about a bipolar match of attacking and defending. The Italians had zest and energy. The game had ebb and a flow.

In acres of space, Ronaldo opened the scoring, but Juventus responded in grand style. The equaliser from Mario Mandzukic, a rejuvenated player courtesy of Juventus’ re-inventionist approach, was a superlative goal, executed with so much athleticism and purpose. Bonucci was the master architect with a great diagonal pass from inside his own half. Alex Sandro and Gonzalo Higuain all got touches before the ball arrived near Mandzukic, who with little space, became a space acrobat. The ball didn’t touch the earth in what was a superb team goal. Perhaps it matched Zidane’s wondrous strike in the 2001 Champions League final against Bayer Leverkussen.

And so, the final had the ingredients of a classic, the seeds planted and sprinkled across the field in a first stanza of end-to-end football, but Juventus faltered in a niggly second half.

Higuain and Paulo Dybala were invisible and even their much-heralded BBC back line was overrun and steamrollered by a masterful Madrid. In the end, the showpiece game wasn’t one for the ages. The Bianconeri were simply too disjointed and too dysfunctional. The final scoreline 4-1 relegated the perennial Italians champions to serial European runners-up in a fraught relationship of long-standing disappointment. Both clubs have much shared history, but in the hierarchy of Europe’s elites, Juventus remain underlings to Madrid – and both Bayern Munich and FC Barcelona.

Ronaldo, Isco and Luka Modric men of the match

Cristiano Ronaldo defies logic. In the first eight minutes he didn’t touch the ball. When he eventually did, his shot was smothered. But both Gianluigi Buffon and BBC were impotent in thwarting the robo-man-machine and super athlete, who inhibits a parallel universe of self-improvement. The preening Portuguese walked past the “immovable” Italians. Nigh invisible for the first 20 minutes, he demonstrated the killer instinct of a wondrous center forward, all of a sudden pouncing in the box after a one-two with Daniel Carjaval.

In general, CR7 wasn’t involved, but he decided the match yet again, almost realising a triple hat-trick in the Champions League. His transformation into a classic striker has been mesmerising, with a strangulating penalty box presence.

His outstanding season may warrant a rethink of this Messia-anic cosmos. Can Lionel Messi reinvent himself as he ages? Ronaldo, faced with his own fading athleticism and dwindling eight pack, has done so superbly – higher up the field, which is very unconventional, but his new role may well allow him to thrive for another few seasons in the twilight of his career.

The Portuguese, however, wasn’t the man of the match. That honor belong to Isco, and Luka Modric. They harnessed Madrid’s superiority. The Croatian played out wide on the right. Before the match Zinedine Zidane had faced a dilemma: to Isco or not to Isco? The 25-year old lit up Madrid’s game, driving their play through the middle and on the left as Modric ventured out to a wide right position. Isco was a midfield floater, who, with guile, escaped Juventus’ marking.

Madrid are the cream of European aristocracy

It was almost rude from Marco Asensio to score a fourth Spanish goal. Madrid radiated a pleasant brutality and aggression in their utter superiority. After half-time it was all Real: ruthless in galactic application, supreme in both aptitude and attitude. Zidane and his team delivered a masterclass – they didn’t crack and reaffirmed their status as Europe’s sole superpower with almost a birthright to triumph in the European Cup. Perhaps it is time to shed that word “Galacticos” and invent an epithet befitting of the current Merengue generation, whose trademark is winning.