Andoni Zubizarreta: The sounds of the Champions League | Soccer

Carlos de Hita, naturalist, said: “In the jungle, each tree has its own sound of rain.”

The Champions League is back, its anthem is back, the best club competition in the world is back, the one that awakens the best dreams and the worst nightmares. So that we can see how exceptional what we consider common is, we have Arsenal and Barça in those round of 16 in which it seems that they have been in forever but that have been waiting for Arteta’s men since those times in which their coach wore the shirt of the Gunners or that it has been three seasons since they were tasted by the culés. I say this because at the expense of the Champions League hamster appearing every year in our lives, it would give the impression that the same clubs are always in search of that Grail and that it is a competition of the same, fighting for the same objective with the only difference in the design of the shirts, perhaps a new sponsor, refers and allows us to differentiate seasons and teams. Ok, I also agree, that this works for everyone except for those who win, who do remember exactly the year, month, day, minute, even a second if necessary and result since those who lose the finals, paraphrasing Nobody remembers Luis Aragonés.

The Champions League returned and told us that today, exactly today, the Portuguese league is one goal above the business machine that is English football. Okay, I know it’s a primary and biased algorithm, but it seems like Porto is waiting for the chords of the celebrated anthem to sound to feel at home and go look for the rival in front of them, whoever it is, whatever their name is. I called. He already did it against Barça in the group stage but he feels more in his authentic role when things are clarified in a knockout format and in that face to face they bring out the best in themselves. It would seem that that same mystique and passion posed an indecipherable challenge for Arsenal, which returned to the round of 16 after seven years of absence, but whose position as leader of the English Premier ahead of greyhounds like Manchester City and Liverpool was a challenge. gave a favorite profile for this first challenge.

Although the noise generated by the 1-0 scoreline scored by Arsenal in Porto has a very different soundtrack to the one associated with that same 1-0 scoreline that reflected the Rome Olympic score at the end of Lazio against Bayern Munich, already that although the result in Porto left Arsenal shaken but with the second leg to recover from, it is felt that the defeat in Rome has been proof of the nine so that we all know that Bayern’s crisis is real, current, implacable. When Bayern overwhelmed Barça in those quarterfinals played in Lisbon in times of covid, leaving the Barça club in the middle of a crisis in which it still continues, one of the evaluation tests of the culé disease was the solidity of the German project, since It was known that nothing Bavarian ever goes into crisis. You see that the globalization of disaster affects even those we consider indestructible and impeccable.

If they put it in a Spanish way, it would be said that Real Madrid is already in the quarterfinals after their victory in Leipzig without assessing whether the Red Bull rain can make a dent in the Bernabéu, that Atlético joins the Arsenal section and a minimal defeat is a window to hope and that the draw achieved by Barça is another missed opportunity for the culés to straighten the course as if the second leg had disappeared. If Carlos de Hita wants to study different sounds of rain on similar roofs, let him come to football and tell us what the same drops sound like on different roofs. It will surely be exciting.