■ Uefa Champions League final: Real Madrid v Juventus, Principality Stadium, kick-off Saturday 10.45pm (UAE), live on beIN Sports HD
Real Madrid are aiming for their 12th European Cup. The next-best tally belongs to AC Milan, who have four fewer than the swaggering Spaniards. Juventus have lost six European Cup finals. No club has a longer list of defeats.
That simple fact, that freight of history, is enough to caution against trusting too heavily in the many credentials of potential champions that Juve, the so-called Old Lady of Italian football, bring into Saturday night’s tantalising, enthralling showdown in Cardiff.
So long have Juventus regarded the European Cup as jinxed, a prize that finds all manner of ways to elude them, that their manager Massimiliano Allegri turns a little snappy when the six defeats are mentioned.
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“Juventus have also won two finals,” he points out. Yes, and the last of those was 21 years ago.
Four Juve finals have been lost since then, most recently when Allegri’s Juventus put up a good show against Barcelona in Berlin, but finished second to the stronger team, 3-1.
Now, with half that side replaced, the Old Lady looks like a Bolder Lady — sharper, more incisive, more confident. But so do Madrid.
For all that they have won two of the last three Uefa Champions League finals, both against Atletico Madrid, this feels like a more robust, more assured squad than the ones that won the title in 2014, after extra time, and in 2016, on penalties.
Gareth Bale is unlikely to start as he makes his way back from injury. Pierre-Philippe Marcou / AFP
“Squad” here is the operative word. Madrid have just won their first Primera Liga title since 2012 with judicious use of substitutes, rotations, and from channelling the drive of youth.
That is partly why there is no fretting about the probable absence from the Madrid starting XI of Gareth Bale, recovering from injury. That may be a shame for Cardiff, Bale’s birthplace, but it means Madrid manager Zinedine Zidane has less of a dilemma about picking the in-form Isco in the space between midfield and an attack led by Cristiano Ronaldo.
The creative influences of Isco and Juve’s Paulo Dybala, playing just off Juventus centre-forward Gonzalo Higuain may well have a key bearing on the outcome.
Higuain’s match up against Karim Benzema is bound to attract heavy scrutiny, too. They were teammates at Madrid for four years, although for much of that time, they were rivals for a single No 9 position in the team.
Higuain’s departure from Madrid in 2013, when he joined Napoli, spelt out to Benzema that he had won that joust.
Gonzalo Higuain comes up against his old club in the final. Giorgio Perottino / Reuters
Higuain never looked back. His goals for Napoli ushered him towards the €90 million (Dh370.6m) transfer to Juve last summer. He contributed 24 goals to this season’s Serie A title. Benzema, meanwhile, has had a troubled time off the pitch, but has become the most trusted ally in attack for Ronaldo.
The duels are finely balanced. Another former Madrid player, Sami Khedira, should be fit to take on his old club, among his midfield tasks to close down Luka Modric and Toni Kroos, Khedira’s German compatriot and a key supplier of passes for Ronaldo and Benzema.
In Madrid’s Kroos and Juve’s Miralem Pjanic, this final is blessed with two of the game’s best deliverers of a dead ball. A great deal of strategising on set-pieces will have been carried out by Zidane and Allegri.
Juventus’s formidable central defenders, Giorgio Chiellini and Leo Bonucci, are famously efficient and infamously rugged in the penalty box. Sergio Ramos makes a habit of advancing from defence for corners and free-kicks to convert goals in major games. He has scored in both Champions League finals he has played.
The duel between Juventus goalkeeper Gianluigi Buffon and Real Madrid forward Cristiano Ronaldo is set to be the most captivating. AFP
Then there are the battles of the full-backs, all of whom regard themselves as auxiliary midfielders — and more.
On one flank the vigorous Dani Carvajal, of Madrid, will seek to master Alex Sandro. On the other the energetic Dani Alves, three times a Champions League winner with Barcelona, faces up to fellow Brazilian, Marcelo, arguably Madrid’s player of the season.
And there is the confrontation which Cardiff must anticipate, a thrilling edge-of-the-seat moment: Ronaldo closing in on Gianluigi Buffon.
It will be the scorer of more than 100 Champions League goals against the veteran who has kept goal in more than 1,000 senior professional matches.
“I’d like Buffon to not have one of his best games,” Ronaldo said of their special duel.
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