OPEN A BOTTLE OF CLARET

While a church bell clanged intermittently and bits of tumbleweed blew across the pitch at the Emirates Stadium, the Allianz Arena hosted a ding-dong battle that pretty much had it all on Wednesday night. For the second evening in eight days, it was left to Bayern Munich and Real Madrid to pull out all the stops and provide the box-office entertainment as Arsenal once again Arsenaled their way past Sporting in a bore draw to earn their place in Bigger Cup semi-finals. More or less picking up where they’d left off at the end of the first leg, Bayern and Madrid served up a gourmand feast of slapstick goalkeeping, a see-sawing scoreline, much better goalkeeping, near-misses, goals of an at times absurdly high quality, several red cards and no end of post-match salty Spanish tears and recriminations. While Madrid have little or no chance of pipping Barça to this season’s La Liga title, they certainly thrashed them in the ungracious Bigger Cup exit stakes.

While their bitter Catalan rivals had some justification for complaining about assorted big decisions that didn’t go their way against Atlético 24 hours previously, Madrid’s post-match meltdown over the red card shown to Eduardo Camavinga when the tie was on a knife-edge resembled the kind of full-on collective tantrum thrown by a group of toddlers ordered to turn Bluey off and go to eat a big plate of vegetables. Already on a yellow card, Madrid substitute Camavinga stupidly delayed a restart. While the impression was conveyed that ref Slavko Vincic probably wouldn’t have issued the second yellow if he’d remembered he’d already cautioned the player, he was left with little or no option when assorted Bayern players enthusiastically reminded him through the medium of mime. Following Camavinga’s untimely exit, Bayern scored the decisive goals that settled the tie.

In the ensuing post-match “debrief” both Arda Güler and his head coach Álvaro Arbeloa appeared to be chosen at random from any number of eligible antagonists to also see red. “Obviously, you can’t send off a player for something like that,” fumed Arbeloa, toeing the general Real party line that suggests the laws of the game should only be applied to other teams. “The referee didn’t even know he had a card and he ruined a very exciting, very evenly matched tie, a real battle and that’s how the game ended.”

While there would have been few complaints from anyone watching if this epic battle had been prolonged for an additional 30 minutes, we can but speculate over how much Camavinga’s exit on 86 minutes contributed to the result on what Bayern striker Harry Kane described as “a special night”. Victory meant even more to Vincent Kompany, who went so far as to put Bayern’s triumph right up there with his previous greatest achievement as a head coach. “I remember we beat Blackburn twice in Burnley,” he intoned, to an audience of blank stares. “No one in this room [of journalists] will want to compare it to today, but it was amazing.” Kompany’s next Bigger Cup task is to mastermind victory over PSG in the semis, where he will no doubt call upon his players to invoke the spirit of Wigan 1-5 Burnley.

LIVE ON BIG WEBSITE

To Bigger Vase! We’ll have piping-hot MBM coverage in the quarter-final second legs from 8pm BST: Scott Murray will guide you through Nottingham Forest 1-2 Porto (agg: 2-3), while Niall McVeigh helms Aston Villa 3-1 Bologna (agg: 6-2).

QUOTE OF THE DAY

“When I arrived nine years ago, I was following a dream of a little boy, wanting to succeed in life, wanting to achieve great things. This city and this club gave me much more than that” – Bernardo Silva confirms what the loose-lipped Pep Lijnders revealed recently, that the Manchester City captain will leave the club at the end of the season.

The image of Fermín López getting the boot from Juan Musso (yesterday’s Football Daily) clearly shows technique learned from English players. Admittedly, López’s head appeared to be at a dangerous level and one might expect an element of risk from crouching like that. As a life-long Hearts fan, I haven’t forgotten the approximation of a tackle attempted by English full-back Jason Talbot, then ‘playing’ for Livingston, on poor young winger Sam Nicholson in 2015. This was one incident in a match which, I believe, carries the accepted term ‘feisty’ (ie five goals, eight yellow cards and one red). And no, this wasn’t the red” – Ken Muir.

Re: your almost-spot-on analysis of Southampton’s chances of automatic promotion (yesterday’s News, Bits and Bobs, full email edition), what you and – to be fair – every other publication I’ve read about this in, have omitted to mention is that Ipswich’s game in hand is away to Saints during the week before the last games of the season. Rather pertinent, I’d say” – Stuart Ainsworth.

If you have any, please send letters to the.boss@theguardian.com. Today’s prizeless letter o’ the day winner is … Ken Muir. Terms and conditions for our competitions, when we run them, are here.

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