They were both as bad as one another

And so there we sat, the footballing world, huddled inside on a still freshly enjoyable evening, lips pursed, bums squeaking, fingers poised with intent over the twittersphere, primed in anticipation and wet with giddiness at the prospect of watching the pinnacle of the beautiful game in all it’s glorious fruition.

The two biggest sides, the two biggest players and the one biggest head in football battling it out for a place in the biggest game in the world’s biggest sport. Unmovable object vs. irresistible force, brains vs. beauty, Coke vs. Pepsi, dogs vs. cats, El Classico Supreme. Add your own orgasmically gushing Tydlesly-esque superlatives here. This was going to be a feast of utterly unquestionable awesomeness surely? “This is it!” – as Michael Jackson once prophetically announced before dropping limply to the floor in agony, prompting a wave of bizarre conspiracy theories and a worldwide sense of deflated disappointment. And if you can find a more obscurely accurate metaphor for the events that transpired in the Bernabeu last night, you might as well stop reading here, it isn’t going to get any better.

Quite why anyone actually thought we were in for a grand spectacle in the first place is slightly peculiar, considering the last two installments of El Quatro Classico had been typified by tense, bitty, low scoring grindhouse football and one of the teams was managed by Jose Mourinho. But alas, many of us nevertheless did. Just as we’d done before the last game to raise such global expectation – the World Cup Final – swayed a little too romantically by the stature and grandiose of the occasion before it descended into a cheat off between thuggery and theatrics.

Not long after Ronaldo had fired his first customary shot into the Sun it became painfully obvious what the housewives favorite in the dashing coat had set his team up for, and what the heavenly ordained Princes of perfection and Guild of the guapa would do to counter it. In case you missed it, or nodded off somewhere around the 30 minute mark, it essentially went something like this:

Foul, dive, foul, dive, hysterical shrieking arm waving. Foul, dive, dive, dive, foul, imaginary card, foul, dive, synchronized arm waving in the referee’s face, dive, foul, big girly non-fight, dive, half time, fight.

Sandwiched somewhere in-between the handbagging and entirely pointless super slow motion footage of players gesticulating to each other or falling over were indeed some sparse attempts at semi competent football. Both Ronaldo and Villa had decent efforts saved but the actual playing highlights to that point could have easily been condensed into a novelty seaside gift shop flick-book or diagrammed on the back of a fag packet.

Barcelona’s customary tactic of complaining en masse about absolutely everything continued unabated off the pitch as their ludicrously haired reserve goalkeeper Pinto (a player who once – brilliantly – managed to halt an opposition attack by imitating the referee’s whistle) got himself sent off for waving his arms about in someone’s face (a recurring theme throughout the evening and possibly – given the neutral nationality of the officials – simply the Spanish equivalent of speaking slower and louder in English in order to get your point across to a perplexed foreigner.)