Just another raw and savage night of Champions League football at the Westfalen: the colours vivid, the sounds ear-shattering, the defences in utter disarray. Late goals from Niclas Fullkrug and Marcel Sabitzer secured Borussia Dortmund’s passage to the semi-finals, breaking open an Atlético Madrid who look a grey scale model of the battleships Diego Simeone once produced.
It was flawed and it was chaotic, and even amid Dortmund’s elation there remains the eternal question of whether they are ever going to allow us to take them seriously, whether they will ever escape this riotously entertaining cycle of boom and bust. This tie felt like a whole psychodrama in its own right, and one Atlético could quite conceivably have finished within the first half-hour in Madrid.
