Some football matches are easy enough to analyse. Winners, losers, bit of a moan, move on. That first leg? Not so much. A team of forensic experts would take weeks to properly pick through the ashes.
It wasn’t just that things were happening, everywhere, all of the time. It was that the evening left us with precisely zero certainty about anything whatsoever.
Barcelona were brilliant in patches, knitting patterns that Inter couldn’t parse. Pedri ran the match like it was a card game in his basement; Yamal was so consistently dangerous it was actually funny.
They were also fragile in the extreme, meekly allowing Inter to race into the lead and then repeating the trick in the second half, just when they looked certain to take control themselves.
It was that kind of night — loose, frayed, nonsensical. The kind of match which offers plenty of promise for tonight’s second leg.
GO FURTHER
Barcelona 3 Inter 3: Breaking down Yamal magic, Inter’s fast start, Dumfries’ unlikely double