Strange beauty in watching City's system malfunction

Madrid being cast as underdogs is a grotesque measure of where we are but absorbing tie was a telling clash of contrasts.

MALFUNCTION: Pep Guardiola during the second leg at the Etihad.

It turns out Pep Guardiola was right after all. Manchester City’s pursuit of the double-treble will now remain “a hypothetical dream”.

This was Pep’s own excellent phrase before Wednesday’s second leg against Real Madrid, a formulation that suggests even Guardiola’s dreams are full of theory, algebra, hypotheticals, like a footballing version of Evelyn Waugh’s professor Silenus, the modernist architect who doesn’t sleep but instead lies in the dark for eight hours with his eyes shut doing high-speed calculations, before rising at dawn to design another machine-age masterpiece.