Det kunde blivit resultatet som Bayern München behövde – även om det är tveksamt om ens det skulle räcka.

I stället blev det ett mardrömsresultat.

För nu finns inte ens hoppet om en falsk Real Madrid-trygghet att luta sig mot i returen.

Det gick inte att ta miste på Kim Min-Jaes frustration när han såg Vinicius Junior rulla in 0–1 på Allianz arena efter 24 minuters spel.

Man kan förstå koreanens frustration – både på sig själv och på hans förstasäsong i Tyskland i allmänhet.

Även om Toni Kroos passning var magnifik, perfekt, och välavvägd som ett vattenpass så skulle ju inte den där ytan få finnas i Bayerns, fram tills dess, sysslolösa försvar.

Frågan är om den hade funnits om Matthijs de Ligt hade varit frisk och startat i en mer samspelt backduo med Eric Dier. Och den frågan kan man ställa sig även om ”Monstret” Min-Jae, sett till vad han sysslade med i Napoli förra säsongen, objektivt egentligen borde vara Bayerns bästa tillgängliga mittback.

Det har han inte varit i München dock. Precis som hela FC Bayern inte varit den dominanta kraft de är så vana vid att vara säsongen 2023/2024.

Men de är fortfarande FC Bayern. I en Champions League-semifinal.

Den typ av motstånd som Real Madrid alltid behandlar med respekt. Ibland kanske lite för stor.

Fortsatte på kvartsfinalslidandet

Det spanska ledordet för 120 tillbakapressade minuter i Manchester var att lida. Utifrån tisdagens inledande 20 minuter såg det ut som att det skulle bli planen även för semifinalen. Bollen vågade knappt in på offensiv planhalva. Leroy Sané sprang i halvcirklar runt Lucas ”Cafucas” Vazquez, som inte direkt såg inte ut den reinkarnation av en brasiliansk högerbacksikon som han gjorde i ett Clásico nyligen.

Det var ingen medveten underlägsenhet a la det som utspelade sig på Eastlands för ett par veckor sedan. Men Real Madrid kan onekligen bemästra att vara tillbakatryckta även på detta vis.

helskärm

För de bayerska hel- och halvchanser som skapades brändes. Leroy Sané fick inte till den sista touchen. Harry Kane fick inte fart på sitt avslut.

Sedan såg Toni Kroos en lucka åt andra hållet.

Så som den blott den tyske maestron har en förmåga att se.

Toni Kroos ser det mesta

2014 såg han vad han kunde bli och vad han kunde åstadkomma om han som Bayernfostrad lämnade Bayern i relativt ung ålder (en flytt väldigt få tyska megastjärnor i hans sits hade valt att göra).

Efter att ha sett både det ena och det andra under sin karriär så såg han också fjolårssommarens spelarmassflykt till Saudiarabien för vad det var.

Han såg också ytan som fanns för Vinicius Junior mitt emellan ett inte så samspelt mittlås.

Där och då, när Vini Junior gjort det yttersta av smörpassningen, kändes det nästan som Real Madrid redan fått en fot i finalen.

Det var nästan så att Real Madrid kände det också och glömde bort vilket lag de faktiskt mötte.

Publikinfernot galopperade igång

Den andra halvleken hade knappt hunnit börja innan allt började studsa rätt för Bayern snarare än åt motsatt håll.

Leroy Sané avslutade en soloräd med ett av de distinktare förstastolpsavslut som man sett.

Lucas Vazquez tog kol på alla Cafú-liknelser när han orutinerat petade ut ett fälleben för Jamal Musiala i straffområdet.

Harry Kanes straffträff var precis så välriktad som den behövde vara.

Ett rött publikinferno galopperade igång på allvar när den ikoniska Bayernmåljingeln spelades på repeat.

helskärm

Vips var Real Madrid tillbaka i sitt lidande stadie igen.

Men de trivs ju där. Och med 90 långa minuter hemma på Santiago Bernabeu att vänta nästa vecka så var nästan känslan att det här inte var ett allt för jobbigt resultat att ta med sig till en retur. De bytte ju faktiskt till och med ut sin notoriske sista minuten-matchhjälte Jude Bellingham vid ställningen 1–2.

Men det skulle faktiskt bli något av ett drömresultat i stället.

Släckte Vinicius den sista Bayernlågan?

Om Kim Min-Jaes misstag på 0–1 var av positionell karaktär så var hans ödesdigra misstag vid 2–2 desto tydligare. Livtaget om Rodrygo gick inte att missa. Domare Leandro Tross….jag menar Clement Turpin tvekade inte peka.

Nu orkade inte ens den stackars koreanen vifta frustrerat – utan blickade bara tomt upp mot ett publikinferno som svalnat likt en majbrasa vid midnatt.

Vinicius Juniors straffkyla släckte sedan den sista, busvisslande publiklågan och fastställde sedan ett resultat som Real Madrid lär vara betydligt belåtnare med att ta med sig till en retur än vad Bayern är.

För med likaläge i en hemmaretur så lär Real Madrid fortsätta behandla FC Bayern för vad FC Bayern egentligen kan och ska vara – utan risk att vaggas in i någon falsk säkerhet likt inledningen av tisdagens andrahalvlek.

Så klart Bayern har alla möjligheter på pappret fortfarande. De är ju ändå FC Bayern.

Men jag har väldigt svårt att se dem rucka på ett lag som är världens mest svårslagna i motvind.

Jo and Mal discuss some of their favorite fandom throuples!

To celebrate the hot-and-heavy sports thriller Challengers, Jo and Mal are here to discuss some of their favorite fandom throuples (09:36). From X-Men to LOTR, they talk about the ins and outs and ups and downs of fiction’s best polyamorous players.

Hosts: Mallory Rubin and Joanna Robinson
Senior Producer: Steve Ahlman
Additional Production: Arjuna Ramgopal
Social: Jomi Adeniran

Subscribe: Spotify / Apple Podcasts / Stitcher / Pandora / Google Podcasts

Oavgjort i första CL-semifinalen

Real Madrid fick med sig ett kryss till returen på hemmaplan.

Tacka Vinícius Júnior för det.

Brassen gjorde båda målen i 2–2-matchen mot Bayern München.

Bayern München gick mot en tung seger på Allianz Arena i den första Champions League-semifinalen när Kim Min-jae drog ner Rodrygo i straffområdet med knappt tio minuter kvar.

Vinícius Júnior fick då chansen att sätta sitt andra mål i matchen och placerade bollen nästan mitt i målet när Manuel Neuer kastade sig åt höger.

helskärm

Bayern München vände

Vinícius Júnior gav Real Madrid ledningen i mitten av första halvlek när han blev frispelad av Toni Kroos.

Sedan vände Bayern München på fyra minuter i andra halvlek när Leroy Sané dunkade in 1–1 och Harry Kane satte 2–1 på straff.

Då spelas returen

Returmatchen spelas i Madrid på onsdag nästa vecka.

Den andra finalplatsen i Champions League gör Borussia Dortmund och Paris Saint-Germain upp om. Dessa lag spelar sin första semifinal i Dortmund under onsdagen.

In ‘Challengers,’ it’s no secret what Art Donaldson and Patrick Zweig want. But what does the object of their affection (and their tennis) truly desire? 

Until Challengers hit theaters last week, Zendaya’s most defining role to date was playing a drug addicted high school sophomore on Euphoria, whose character we last saw entrepreneurially turn a suitcase full of drugs into her own personal stash of drugs, racking up a debt of about $10,000 to a terrifying drug dealer that listens to way too much Gerry Rafferty …

Somehow, though, Zendaya’s new defining role is a character who’s an even bigger mess than that.

In Challengers’ two-plus-hour running time, Tashi Duncan cheats on her fiancé with his ex–best friend while wearing said fiancé’s dead grandmother’s ring. A few years later, she cheats on her now-husband with the same cuckolding ex-best friend in front of a billboard that features her husband’s 20-foot-tall visage … moments after spitting in said cuckold’s face, but not before cuddling with him in the backseat of the Honda he lives in, where she’s also just asked him to throw a match so her husband will keep playing tennis—even though he’s a tired and broken shell of himself. Even in Chanel espadrilles and a $2 million bob, there is mounting suspicion that Tashi Duncan ain’t shit.

But I have to disagree. There’s a popular saying often attributed to Oscar Wilde, but best sung by Janelle Monáe, that touts: Everything is about sex except for sex, which is about power. But Oscar Wilde never met Tashi Duncan, nor the chaotic minds who brought her to life: director Luca Guadagnino, screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes, and Zendaya herself. They might tell you that everything is sex except for sex—which is tennis. If Tashi Duncan ain’t shit, it’s only because her blind ambition on the court had her dropping the ball for over a decade on seeing a love triangle where all sides touch for what it really is: a potentially thriving throuple.

When we meet Tashi in the present day, it’s clear that she’s achieved success and power, but it’s not the success and power she truly wanted—the success and power she was robbed of years before. In the stands of the Phil’s Tire Town Challenger in New Rochelle, New York, Tashi Duncan is the embodiment of elite tennis: Cartier watch, tailor-made shirt dress starched by someone else’s hands, Aston Martin partnership inked …

She’s clearly advanced economically in the world, thanks to her brains and her husband Art’s body (and maybe sometimes his ex–best friend Patrick’s body when, y’know, they’re in Atlanta). But wealth and status and a long-lasting relationship with a child who likes Spider-Verse have not contented Tashi like they have her husband. In Big Little Lies, Meryl Streep’s character—who also sported an iconic bob—tells Reese Witherspoon’s character that she’s a want-er. “There are people in life who content themselves with what they have, and there are others who just … want.” Tashi Duncan wants to win, she wants power, she wants to play good fucking tennis. Art has only ever really wanted Tashi (and Patrick when they’re in the dining hall, or in their motel room, or playing tennis), and having married her he’s content. After Art confesses to his wife and coach that he wants to retire at the end of the season, she later finds him fast asleep in the bed with their young daughter. It’s a glimpse into his future without tennis: a rich, handsome, doting father. Sounds pretty good.

But where do we find Tashi after Art’s rare moment of straightforward communication? Oh, that would be on a secret rendezvous with his longtime psychosexual frenemy, begging him to let Art win their Challenger match in a last-ditch effort to inspire enough (false!) confidence to keep Art from retiring. And when begging doesn’t work, she fights, coerces, slaps, and finally fucks Patrick in the middle of a literal trash storm in a New Rochelle parking lot …

So, yeah. Maybe Tashi’s unquenchable thirst to succeed makes her trash a lot of the time. But she keeps her ambition blind for a good reason. After all, what is Tashi’s ruthless quest for power and achievement if not a decades-long exercise in avoiding the truth: Her life has been a tragedy, and she’s afraid she’ll never overcome it.

At 18, Tashi Duncan was a tennis prodigy with an Adidas deal and an endlessly promising future; by 20, she’d suffered a career-ending injury on the Stanford tennis team, an unnecessary detour she took to develop skills beyond just “hitting a ball with a racket,” only to learn that hitting a ball with a racket was the only skill she really needed or wanted. With her dream crushed, Tashi falls out with Patrick, whose tenacity and talent she respects, but whose lack of motivation keeps her from emotionally connecting with him. She falls in love with and begins coaching Art into a successful tennis career, but never accepts that his ambition and raw talent can’t equal hers. In lieu of grieving the future she lost, she begins living half a life—haunting a space that once belonged to her. Is Tashi terrorizing her two little white boys in a quest to achieve something that only her two own healthy knees could have ever achieved? Yeah. Maybe. Was telling Patrick he had “a better shot with a handgun in his mouth” than winning a Grand Slam at 31 an OK thing to tell someone? Probably not. Was it kind to confirm Art’s greatest fear that she’d leave him if he didn’t beat Patrick in a tone that made it really hard to tell if she was serious? Definitely!

But here’s the thing.

Those two little white boys? They like her telling them what to do, and they always have. They love her whipping them into a confused frenzy, and her loss of tennis doesn’t change that for them, only for her. From the moment Patrick and Art meet Tashi, they worship her like a god. When Art finally admits to Tashi that he just hopes she’ll love him even after he’s done playing tennis, she sarcastically asks him, “What am I, Jesus?” To which, Art replies, “Yeah.” To Art, Tashi’s love is paramount; to Patrick, it’s a carrot, forever dangled in front of him. But deep down, they know: Jesus Christ died for humanity’s sins, and Tashi Duncan would kill for hers. Tashi’s injury was the ultimate betrayal of the universe and of self. And yes, obviously talk therapy would have been a better way to deal with the fear and grief that came with that kind of loss—but, in this twisted triangle, using the irresistible draw between two former best friends who both also happen to be professional tennis players sort of works, too.

The look that comes over teenage Tashi’s face as she watches Art and Patrick kissing above her in a dirty motel room—on Zendaya’s inordinately expressive face—could be that of an all-powerful god. It could be that of a monster. But Tashi Duncan isn’t a villain any more than the other two corners of this triangle are. She’s simply a tragedy trying to game her way into a triumph. And by god, she kind of does it. With sex, power, and tennis, just like she hoped she would at 18.

When Art and Patrick first make their way into Tashi’s orbit, she tells them that tennis isn’t an expression of self, it’s a relationship. After all, you need an opponent to play tennis. And to play good fucking tennis, like we see in the Challenger final, you need whatever the hell Tashi Duncan has been up to with her two little white boys. Tashi would kill to be whole again, Art would kill to give her his place, and Patrick would kill to be accepted by them once more. It works in perfect, toxic harmony because they all need one another to propel themselves forward—and, in the unexpectedly joyous end, they all want each other too.

“For about 15 seconds there, it was like we were in love,” Tashi once told the boys of her Junior U.S. Open final opponent (the same one who eventually became the no. 1 women’s player in Tashi’s absence on the professional circuit). In the present day, with the final Rosebud-racket-reveal that Patrick has had sex with Tashi again, Art is finally inspired to play like he wants to win again. As their volley builds into a fervor almost foreign to tennis, the distance closes between all of them, until Art crashes over the net into Patrick’s arms, both of their faces broken apart in joyful grins. Tashi lets out an unbridled scream of ecstasy—the kind she hasn’t screamed since she last played. The kind that only a moment of natural synchronicity deserves. Three forsaken vessels, finally made perfect as one.

In that final moment, Art and Patrick have finally found their way back to one another—back to tennis—with Tashi as their guide. And there’s a hint of it there: Tashi’s chance not just at winning, not just at power, not just at tennis—but at contentment.

Tate, Cousin Sal, and KOC are here to give their thoughts on the recent NBA playoff games

Tate Frazier is joined by Cousin Sal and Kevin O’Connor to react to the NBA playoffs, decide what’s an over- or under-reaction to the most recent sports stories, and take a trip on the riverboat casino.

Host: Tate Frazier
Guests: Cousin Sal and Kevin O’Connor
Producers: Jack Wilson and Jonathan Frias

Subscribe: Spotify