The 6 Best Semifinals Of The Champions League Era

FIFA sent this whizzing across my Twitter feed Monday morning:

Spain, Germany and Italy are all in the last four. Which country has the best #UCL semi-final pedigree? pic.twitter.com/EU3NWL0EeD

— Champions League (@ChampionsLeague) May 4, 2015

As most charts do, this makes obvious what is already clear: Spanish teams have consistently found their place in the final four of the Champions League, the English game has eroded, and the Bundesliga has surged to a prominent place in the world's biggest club competition.

Last week I mentioned how the top levels of world soccer feel inevitable and averse to any kind of change, but that view helps illustrate that the game does actually evolve in a somewhat healthy - albeit cash driven - way. This year's semifinals are a perfect microcosm of that charted trend: Italy (Juventus), Germany (Bayern Munich), and Spain squared (Barcelona, Real Madrid) make up the final four. 

The UCL group stages are fun, but they're a bit predictable. The round of 16 and quarterfinals are fine, but for every David Luiz bullet-header there's poor Porto getting pounded. The semifinals are the long campaign's best round. Most years, four of the best six teams in the world are left, this year's fix of the yellow card accumulation rule ensures no useless suspensions (!!!), and the two-leg tie means an avoidance of the hit-or-miss-ness of the one-game final.

With the semifinals starting this week, let's gawk at some of the penultimate round's best games and moments. I'm only picking from 1994 onward - that was the year the European Cup became the Champions League. 

Apologies to retro Dortmund, anti-American goalkeeper Oliver Kahn, and this great homemade clip of a Lionel Messi wondergoal for narrowly missing out on this list.

May 4, 2004 - Deportivoooooohhhh Noooooo

Slot this inside the "Dejan Lovren WTF Is That Defender Doing?" category. The first leg at Porto and 57 minutes in the second leg yielded no goals. Then Deportivo’s Cesar Martin took down Deco and gave up the penalty that would send Porto to the final. 

If you didn’t already know by the 1-0 final scoreline, Jose Mourinho was the Portuguese side's manager. The win moved Porto Mourinho to 90-15-21; he won once more - the Champions League final a few weeks later - and then jetted off to Chelsea.

Poor Deportivo. The play is particularly brutal because Deco was harming no one on the edge of the box - he was even moving away from the net! - when Cesar whiffed on the ball and took out Deco’s legs. More bad: Since that challenge, Deportivo have made exactly one other Champions League (they were bounced in the 2004-05 group stage), they’ve been relegated twice, and they haven’t finished higher than sixth in La Liga.

May 4, 2005 - RETE! RETE! RETE! AMBROSINI!

AC Milan led Dutch side PSV Eindhoven 2-0 after the first leg in Italy. PSV scored the first two goals of the second leg to even the tie. With both teams gazing at extra time, the pace of the game slowed. A couple of stoppage time minutes were added. Then Kaka found a bit of space and swung one into the net off of Massimo Ambrosini’s forehead. The television call (see above) is magnificent. Milan got the tie’s only away goal, and even though PSV scored a minute later, the Italians pushed through to the final. 

Many of these big semifinal moments are direct lines to a victory in the final. Ambrosini’s header was not one of those fated winners. There, in the final in Istanbul, they flew to a 3-0 lead before being Gerrarded in the most famous win in Liverpool history.

April 30, 2002 - Neuville’s Howitzer

Bayer Leverkusen were further than they’d ever been in the European Championship or Champions League, and the Germans had earned a 2-2 result at Old Trafford in the first leg of the semifinal. 

In the second leg, Manchester United’s Roy Keane put the visitors ahead on aggregate with a slashing, twisting goal, and then, with the home fans fretting, Oliver Neuville blindly launched a missile off the crossbar and in.

The result - 2-2, then 1-1 with Leverkusen advancing - isn’t a shock, but HOT DAMN, OLIVER, WHAT WAS THAT?!

Photo: DailyMotion

He’s right in there, in the middle of six United defenders. How did he even get that shot off? If Messi had done that - and he has, don’t worry - we’d be using that clip as fuel on the fire that is the "Best of all Time" debate. Neuville scored more than 150 goals in his career; that was certainly one of his finest.

Leverkusen - the only team to ever make a UCL final without having ever won a domestic title - lost to Real Madrid 2-1 on a Zidane golazo in the final.

April 24, 2012 - The $50 Million Goal

I love Fernando Torres. Like most, I have no idea what happened to his game, or his confidence, after he left Liverpool in 2011. He played 102 Premier League games for the Reds, and in those games he scored 65 goals. Torres then played 110 league games for Chelsea in the same amount of years, and in those years he scored 20 times. He was ridiculed by his own fans, booed in his own stadium, played less and less by a few different managers, and seemed a shell of his long-haired, floating former self.

But Torres always showed up in Europe. He scored 17 goals in 40 Champions League and Europa League appearances for Chelsea, including the improbable clincher in 2012 against Barcelona. 

Chelsea won the first leg 1-0 at Stamford Bridge because Petr Cech was the glass side of a skyscraper. Then Barcelona went 2-0 up at Camp Nou in leg two to take a commanding lead before Ramires countered with a lofting equalizer just before halftime.

At this point in their masterpiece of a tiki-taka half-decade, Pep Guardiola and Lionel Messi and Barcelona were being called one of the best teams ever. So, you’ll understand why no sane, breathing person thought Chelsea had a remote chance to escape the 45 minute onslaught that the Spanish beauties were about to unleash.

But Chelsea did it. They played 11 defenders, parked the big blue bus, and held off the home side. For as long as I’ve been watching the sport, I’ve seen nothing like it - I was so sure, even into the 75th or 80th minute, that Barcelona were going to score. It was only a matter of "how soon" and "how beautiful.” Any doubt was nowhere to be found.

But that second half was the first time I was jarred out of the Barcelona viewing experience. You could see Messi, Iniesta, and the rest of them just run out of ideas. They ended up passing the ball around the box for the last 15 minutes of the game, creating no full chances, finding no space to squirm past the blue wall. I’d never seen them look so unsure of how to attack.

And then in the second minute of stoppage time Torres went cherry picking. With the whole game being played in a 25-yard space, Chelsea’s desperate counter-attack left Torres one-on-one with Victor Valdes. Torres shimmied, played the ball just wide enough to avoid the keeper, and scored perhaps the biggest goal in the club's history to that point. Fernando Torres, allegedly the opposite of Batman, sent Chelsea to the final, where they beat Bayern Munich in penalties for their first European title.

April 14, 1998 - Del Piero’s Hatty

This one goes way back, but it’s a real winner. In Juventus’s magical Lippi-heyday, they found one of the best young players in the world. Alessandro Del Piero would score more than 200 goals for Juventus in nine years, but 1997-98 was his coming out party, punctuated by an exclamatory free kick against Monaco in the Champions League semis. He scored 21 domestic goals that season and added 10 more in the UCL, including a three-bagger in the semis against Monaco.

The second and third goals of his first-leg hat trick were penalties, but WOO WEE THAT FREE KICK THOUGH. The movement on that ball was almost violent, as if it had a real problem with the very top corner of the net and needed to have a few words with it immediately.

Juventus advanced to its third straight final and lost to Real Madrid.

May 6, 2009 - A Swing And A Miss, A Swing And A Make

There’s so much to digest here. It’s 2009. Guus Hiddink managed Chelsea. Michael Essien put the home side ahead 1-0 in the second leg against Barcelona. It’s stoppage time, and Barcelona were scrambling to get bodies forward, and then Essien whiffed. He swung his leg and missed the ball. The ball rolled to the feet of Lionel Messi. Three touches later, the ball was in Chelsea's net.

The style of that final Barcelona attack is what’s striking after six years. A long pass from defense to midfield, a long pass from one side of the center circle to the other, a long pass to the wing, a cross into the box, a long distance rocket golazo…it’s tiki-taka’s antithesis. But I suppose desperation makes for as much magic as comfort.

Barcelona demolished Manchester United 2-0 in the final; it was Pep’s first as a manager, Messi’s second as a player, and it helped make that era into something just short of a dynasty. They would nab that moniker two seasons later by winning Europe again.

I’ve watched Iniesta's goal thousands of times. I’ve heard it in at least a half dozen languages. I’ve entered a “watch a different Chelsea crowd member each time you press play” rabbit hole. I’ve felt sorry for Essien, and for the devastated Ashley Cole and Frank Lampard. 

I daydream about Pep's little celebration hop and his full sprint in a full suit down the sideline, and I smile each time I imagine him tilting his head up and pointing his palms to the sky. But mostly I think about Iniesta swinging his leg through the ball, redirecting its path in almost a perfect right angle, and then ripping his shirt off in the joyous, chaotic confusion that can only mean he'd won.