Musing on the UEFA Champions League Quarter Finals

STAGED SURPRISES ON A TUESDAY NIGHT 

How many would have made the predictions that Barcelona would lose to Roma! And with the alluring attacking football that has made Manchester City undoubtedly the winner of the 2017/18 Premier League season, no football pundit could have predicted that the Citizens would lose three consecutive matches, conceding 8 goals in the process. Well, what our mind failed to fathom has happened before our very eyes! 

The outcome of tonight's matches between Barcelona and Roma, and Manchester City and Liverpool showed that the best performing teams in the different leagues across Europe (Manchester City in the Premier League; Barcelona in the La Liga; Juventus in the Serie A might likely join the list by Wednesday night) with probably the exception of Bayern Munich--who knows?--are knocked out of the quarter finals of Europe's biggest club football competition. What a night! 

Football is absurdly theatrical, the unpredictability of its outcome bearing first hand witness to this. That is what the football showpiece at Roma and the Etihad on Tuesday night has shown and drawn upon our reasoning. It is in the second round of this same competition that Barça have pulled one of the greatest comeback, in what will go down in football history as a masterly classic show of rarity, demolishing Paris Saint German 6 goals to 1, after a 4-1 defeat to PSG in the first leg in Paris. But exactly 398 days later, the same Barcelona team, perhaps with little changes, were outsmarted, not necessarily because of the opponents' superior tactics but by a gallant performance that proved the magic that produced the remarkable performance in Camp Nou, Europe's biggest stadium, turned against the very team it favoured on the night of March 8, 2017. For once, it robbed Lionel Messi the talismanic performance that titillates seismic vibrations from the rapturous applause and jubilations of football-loving Catalonian fans. Such humiliations as witnessed in Paris more than a year ago are perhaps limited to the camp called Nou and impotent outside it. Who knows! Football-loving fans could have more surprises awaiting them in Real Madrid/Juventus and Bayern Munich/Sevilla matches just less than 24 hours away. 

One thing is, however, sure tonight: football's magic performances are not always the exclusive preserve of famed actors. In addition to this is that fact that Roma will be playing in the semi-final of the UCL for the first time since 1984!