Real Madrid Edges Inter Milan 2-1 in Champions League Opener

alright. Real Madrid. Inter Milan. Bernabéu. Tuesday night, Champions League opener, and I’ll just say it up front — Madrid should not have won this by looking at the underlying numbers, and they won anyway, and that combination is basically the entire Mourinho experience distilled into ninety minutes.

fourteen minutes in — Mbappé. Brahim Díaz threads a first-time ball after Yann Bisseck fumbles it away, and Mbappé just — finishes, clean, no fuss. and here’s the number that actually stopped me: that goal puts him level with Raúl. seventy-one goals. fifth all-time in this competition’s history. Raúl. a Madrid legend, a name you don’t casually bump into a ranking with, and Mbappé’s doing it in what feels like no time at all. I don’t know how I feel about that pace, honestly — impressed, mostly, but also a little unsettled by how normal it’s starting to look.

then nine minutes later — twenty-three — it’s 2-0, and this one’s uglier, this one’s a gift. Pavard plays it back to his own keeper, Josep Martínez hesitates in his own box, hesitates for one beat too long, and Valverde just steals it off his toes and rolls it home. that’s not a goal Real Madrid earned so much as a goal Inter handed over gift-wrapped. and look — I get why Madrid fans will take it, a goal’s a goal, nobody’s refunding it. but if I’m being honest, and I’d rather be honest than kind here, that’s the kind of goal that flatters a scoreline.

because the actual match — the match underneath the scoreline — was Inter’s. fifty-nine percent possession. fifteen shots to nine. eleven corners to four. Curtis Jones rattles the crossbar before half. Thuram and Lautaro both test Courtois early and often. the expected-goals split, 2.91 to 1.78, and even that gap is basically just the two gifted goals sitting there skewing it. strip those out and this is a coin flip, maybe worse than a coin flip for the home side.

Augusto gets one back at 77 — ghosts past Dumfries on the right, meets Lautaro’s low cross, thumps it past Courtois, no chance — and for a few minutes there I genuinely thought Madrid were going to blow this. the Bernabéu crowd goes quiet in that specific way stadiums go quiet when they can feel a lead evaporating. it doesn’t evaporate. Madrid hold on. barely.

and — Mourinho. can’t not talk about Mourinho. this is his second spell in charge at Madrid, and this ground, this exact stadium, is where his old Inter side beat Bayern in the 2010 final. sixteen years ago. and the guy across from him tonight, Chivu, was on that Inter team. that’s — that’s a genuinely weird bit of football theater, a manager returning to the scene of his greatest triumph to beat a team led by his own former teammate. I don’t think that’s a coincidence anyone scripted, but it sure reads like one.

post-match he says the players did a fantastic job under tough conditions, says it wasn’t a boring match — and no argument there, it was not boring, not for one second of it — but “tough conditions” is doing a lot of quiet work in that sentence for a team that got out-shot by six and out-possessed by eighteen points.

so where’s this leave things. Madrid: three points, campaign started, Mbappé still climbing that all-time list at a pace that frankly should worry every team left on the fixture list. Inter: nothing to show for arguably the better ninety minutes, and that’s the sentence that should actually bother them heading into matchday two — not the scoreline, the performance underneath it. losses you can shrug off if you were outplayed. losses where you were the better side and still lost — those are the ones that linger.

Sources: ESPN, Al Jazeera Sport, Bolavip US, Managing Madrid, Sport.ua.