Real Madrid are magic, it's the only explanation, after sneaking past Chelsea in Champions League - The Warm-Up

Before last night's game against Real Madrid, Thomas Tuchel told the world (and presumably his Chelsea players) that they would need a fantastic script. And they got one! It's just that in the end it turned out to be written not by Tuchel, or his players, but by some unholy conference of Jerry Bruckheimer, Harry Houdini, Gandalf and, inevitably, Luka Modric.

How did they do it? Nobody knows. Oh, sure, people will tell you they know. They will say things like "It only takes a few moments to win a football match," and "Age ain't nothing but a number," and "Frankly, Chelsea probably should have taken a few more of those chances". But these explanations, fine as they are, share an unspoken admission: you know, we know, and everybody knows that it's magic.

Tear up the pitch at the Bernabeu and you'll find the original European Cup trophy floating in a vat of holy water, brass wires running up to the grass above. Or Alfredo Di Stefano's teeth glowing inside a bone casket. Or an ancient book with yellowed pages that contains, written in blood that somehow never fades, the 1,001 true names of Guti.

How else to explain the fact that, in this game of four halves, Chelsea more-or-less battered their opponents for three of them. And a bit extra! How else to understand the fact that Real Madrid were broken by the third goal, then given their VAR reprieve, then broken again… and yet still didn't collapse. How else to allow for Modric not only seeing that pass, but then trying that pass, and then nailing That Pass.

That pass, eh? Call it a trivela, call it 'doing a Quaresma', call it just an "oh my days". It is, perhaps, the least graceful thing a footballer can do with their body, at least on purpose: it looks something like playing a bunker shot backhanded with a hockey stick while sneezing. All the sports at once, and none of them. And then up it goes, and over, and down it comes into the exact square inch of space where Rodrygo's foot is going to be if he carries on moving at that speed along that line. Dink. Thump. Goal?!

The ancient Greeks believed that the movement of celestial bodies through space, the interrelated dance of the sun and moon and stars, produced a kind of music, deep and beautiful and heard not in the ears but the soul. "There's not the smallest orb which thou behold'st," wrote Shakespeare, "But in his motion like an angel sings". "The cosmic ballet," said Leonard Nimoy, "goes on." Watching that ball go singing and giggling and yodelling through the air last night, only to end in that great percussive crash, you can kind of see what they were getting at.

Although you have to feel for Rodrygo, just a little bit. A spectacular finish to blow open a spectacular game, and he got all the good expletives right up until we saw the first replay.

One of the great advantages of magic as an explanation is that the consequences don't have to be brutal. Chelsea will be able to claim, with some justification, that they played very well for most of the tie. They created more than enough chances to win any normal game of football, and then something weird happened. Within the bounds of ordinary things that can be controlled, they did just fine. Whoever the new owners are, they'll be able to greet Tuchel with a sympathetic handshake rather than a P45.

The downside is that it's quite hard to work out what happens next. Real Madrid have now been effectively eliminated from the competition by PSG and by Chelsea, and yet are somehow still in the thing. Chances are, come the semis, that this magical invincibility is going to crash right into the other great narrative of the modern Champions League. "Real Madrid are magic" vs. "Pep Guardiola always overthinks things". Brace for impact.

Here, roughly speaking, is the general sense we got of the other game, the one we weren't watching, presented as a series of confused questions. Villarreal are doing a lot of defending, but sort of on their own terms? Bayern have lots of attackers on the pitch, so shouldn't they be doing more shooting? Ah, Bayern have scored, that's probably that then?

Villarreal have done what?

It's some counter. It would be some counter in training, let alone the 87th minute of a Champions League second leg. Each person involved has some kind of pressure that they navigate: Raul Albiol has to resist the urge just to head big and long, Dani Parejo has to escape the press in midfield. Giovani Lo Celso has to weigh the pass, and everybody else has to stay onside. It's perfect, delicate, precise because it has to be. At every juncture it could go wrong; at every juncture it doesn't.

Asked after the game how they did it, Juan Foyth said: "A lot of patience, a lot of concentration, a lot of calm." And, of course, "Hours and hours of videos… We prepare every game in the same way, with a lot of humility. We come to the pitch to do the work." A victory for the powers of homework, then. A triumph for being managed by a massive, charming, impossibly intense nerd.

But you can see how it paid off in that goal, in all that defending, in that first leg performance that could and maybe should have brought more than one goal. The best way to achieve calmness in a position of huge stress is first to know what you're doing, and then to know that you know. Villarreal, Unai Emery, this motley collection of veterans and youngsters and Tottenham rejects? They know that they know. And now they have the semi-final to prove it.

If you heard an excited squeak in the Merseyside area yesterday, do not worry. That was just Donny van de Beek catching up with the news. Turns out Manchester United and Erik ten Hag have a verbal agreement: the latter has agreed to manage the former. As soon as the non-verbal side of the deal is concluded — Darren Fletcher, in full mime costume, has to persuade Ten Hag out of an invisible box — then it will all be official.

Also some stuff about contracts and waiting until after the Dutch Cup final has happened. Details, details.

This, then, is the honeymoon period. This is the easiest moment Ten Hag will know as United manager: this on-ramp of anticipation. Today's questions are kind questions, today's hypotheticals are optimistic. How will he set his team up? What can we learn from his successes? How can we get hold of five thousand bald wigs for preseason?

In this, Ten Hag is helped by the fact that of the various options he is definitely the most interesting. His Ajax sides have been a joy in Europe, far beyond their means, and he's put together not one but two of them. And yet the question marks are big and interesting, from the Eredivisie tax to the state of United, and on to a squad that was put together by lottery.

Still, unusually for United, they seem to have got their timings and priorities right. David Moyes was overpromoted as a continuity candidate; Louis van Gaal on the basis of one glorious summer. Jose Mourinho was an exercise in chasing long-faded glamour; Ole Gunnar Solskjaer a comforting rebound that went on far too long.

This time, all being well, United will appoint a manager with a record of success at home and in Europe, a manager whose achievements are in the present and not the past, a manager who has both nothing and something to prove. You'd think that would be the baseline for anybody coming into the job, and yet the last time they did that it was 1986. This is not to compare Ten Hag and Alex Ferguson; that would obviously be unhelpful. But it's about time a United board took the managerial appointment seriously.

Defeated a superclub in the Champions League quarter-finals? It's time for the Good Posts.

Two for the price of one today, as we celebrate the 20th anniversary of Bend It Like Beckham, one of the few genuinely good films ever made about football. Here's Rachel Hall over at the Guardian, looking at the film that was "an early spark for many women, and especially British Asians, who saw their own experiences of wanting to play the game but struggling to find a way to reflected for the first time."

And then we swing over to Gal-Dem, where Neelam Tailor has put together an excellent oral history of a film that nearly didn't get made at all. Here's director Gurinder Chadha: "I just kept pushing and pushing and then I submitted it to what is now called the lottery. A producer told me that they had seen a report on my script saying 'don’t fund it' because you will never find an Indian girl that can play football that can bend a ball like David Beckham. I was like, 'what the f***ing f***?' … 'Does this person think Harrison Ford jumps out of helicopters?'"

Time to round out these Champions League semi-finals. Liverpool have a two-goal lead to defend at home against Benfica, and Manchester City take a one-goal lead to Atletico Madrid.