Real Madrid Is Stuck

On Wednesday, Real Madrid hosted Manchester City in a portentous Champions League showdown that, for the home team, promised or threatened to mark a definitive before and after. Win, and Madrid could credibly claim the result as a turning point, when a devastatingly talented roster, helmed by one of the game's most exciting young managers, put aside its shaky beginnings and started to become the superteam it was meant to be. Lose, especially if the loss was a bad one, and you could assume that the club would take it as the final sign that things simply weren't working, and that the time had come for drastic change, starting with the firing of the aforementioned exciting young manager Xabi Alonso.

But reality didn't prove quite so neat. The Blancos played neither great nor horribly, and though they did lose, 2-1, the defeat was neither encouragingly narrow nor embarrassingly lopsided. In the end, in spite of the match's weighty stakes, Real is right were it was before, which is nowhere.