Chelsea are the 2020/21 Champions league winners, as Thomas Tuchel and Chelsea celebrated. Pep Guardiola walked straight past the Champions League trophy without giving it a single glance. Manchester City were outplayed in a 1-0 Champions League final defeat, and this was the closest Guardiola would get to touching the European Cup since he last won it 10 years ago.
Guardiola might as well have been a million miles away as runners-up medal in hand, the City manager kept his head down. It was probably through a mixture of anger and exasperation, but there was also likely to be a heavy dose of regret, given how not for the first time — he overthought his line-up and tactics, when simplicity would have been sensible.
“I did what I thought was the best decision [with my selection],” Guardiola said after the game.
But this was further evidence that, coaching genius though he undoubtedly is, the two-time Champions League winner has a habit of picking the wrong time and the wrong place to experiment.
Instead, it was Tuchel who took the spoils, having kept his approach simple and stuck to tried and tested methods. In the stadium where Guardiola’s old rival Jose Mourinho built his first Champions League-winning team with FC Porto, Chelsea used a counterattacking game, based on rapid breaks from defensive positions, to land a knockout blow on City for the third time in less than 2 months.
They ended City’s hopes of a domestic treble when they triumphed in the FA Cup semi-finals in April and delayed their title celebrations with victory in Manchester.
Now, in a final watched by a limited crowd of just over 14,000 fans who created a raucous atmosphere, they have denied City the first Champions League crown they and Guardiola so crave.
“It was an incredibly tough fight, what a fight. Today they were determined to win this. We wanted to be the stone in their shoe,” Tuchel told BT Sport
Timo Werner should have done better than shoot straight at Ederson in the 14th minute.
Chelsea then suffered an injury blow as an emotional Thiago Silva was forced off hurt, Andreas Christensen taking the Brazilian’s place in central defence.
Yet it was they who opened the scoring in the 42nd minute, Mason Mount’s ball splitting the City defence, allowing Havertz a long ball dribbling pass Ederson and converted into an empty net.
City now needed to break down a Chelsea defence that has been exceptional under Tuchel.
But they lost De Bruyne just before the hour mark, the Belgian taken out in a collision with Antonio Ruediger that appeared to leave him concussed.
He came off in tears, and Guardiola instead turned to Sergio Aguero for the latter stages, but there was to be no glorious send-off as a City player for the Argentine, as a Riyad Mahrez shot sailed just over in the sixth minute of injury time.
A decade on from his last European Cup triumph, there was to be no third for Guardiola. He remains one adrift of the record for the coaches with most wins in the competition, held jointly by Bob Paisley, Carlo Ancelotti and Zinedine Zidane.
:Euro Next.
By Edochie Collins.
