Karim Benzema's completely ridiculous one-man show at Chelsea - The Warm-Up

There are headers, and then there are headers. Karim Benzema's second goal was a very, very good header, one of those pleasing redirections. Cross comes over this way, header goes back that way; all relevant laws of physics and biology remain unbroken. Fine work.

Karim Benzema's first header was ludicrous.

Honestly, we're not even sure a head should be able to do that. There aren't enough muscles in the general area. Over comes the ball, after a rat-a-tat exchange with Vinicius Jr., and Benzema rises and hits it like, like … well, like what? Something volleyball? Something tennis? Not silly enough. Like a superhero punching a bus through a building? Better, though it doesn't quite catch the precision of the thing.

As you can see, we're struggling. But nothing like a head, we can be clear on that.

It was a goal so brilliant it went off into daftness, and in that respect it rather suited what was, in the end, a very silly game of football. As often seems to happen in this competition, Real Madrid played up to their reputations: Toni Kroos and Luka Modrić still brilliant and still refusing to age; everybody around them working ferociously hard. Vinicius Jr and Ferland Mendy took possession of their side of the pitch, and Chelsea never got it back.

The hosts, meanwhile, played down to their worst instincts. The first goal was Madrid's third dangerous visit into Chelsea territory: the first had ended with Vinicius hitting the bar; the second with him crowded out before he could get the shot away. But on both occasions space had yawned wide and open where no space should be, and Thomas Tuchel had thrown his arms into the air in disgust.

Chelsea's shell-shocked manager announced afterwards that "If we keep on playing like this we will lose in Southampton and then we don’t need to think about the Bernabéu: we will get hammered in the Bernabéu." Quite what has happened to Chelsea is a mystery, not least to Tuchel, but Benzema's third goal felt emblematic.

In a team that bears little resemblance to any Chelsea we've seen under Tuchel, two Chelsea players combined to look nothing like themselves. First Edouard Mendy, one of the most reliable and clearheaded goalkeepers in England, made a poor decision and then executed poorly; Row Z was right there. Then Antonio Rüdiger, who loves nothing more than kicking the ball really hard and really far, decided to go for some kind of weird outside of the boot poke-apology. The start of a heavy April is no time to lose one's sense of self.

Perhaps Chelsea's late flurry of chances suggests that the tie isn't completely over; perhaps the opposite, given that Madrid had their slippers on and Chelsea missed them all anyway. The sight of Romelu Lukaku screaming up into the night sky, having placed his header neatly and precisely wide, suggests that a simple change in personnel isn't going to do the trick. And at the end of a night in which Chelsea were first pulled apart, then fell apart, there was only one conclusion. Real Madrid are almost as good as Brentford.

Losing a game is never good. Losing a game like this, though: that's the kind of thing that can snap a football club in half. Everton needed the win; Everton had the win… and Everton dropped the win onto the floor, where it broke, and then they slipped on the shards and banged their collective head and looked ridiculous.

Football managers are not poets (except John Toshack), and yet every now and then one of them comes up with a line that lands with a poetic thump right where the soul joins the brain. Simple words, simply arranged, that reveal something fundamental about the universe. Alex Ferguson's "Lads, it's Tottenham" has followed Spurs around ever since Roy Keane shared it with the world, perfectly encapsulating the trembling foundations on which all Spurs sides are built.

We're guessing that Sean Dyche's brutal half-time team talk, in which he told his team "I'm not sure they know how to win a game," will end up having the same kind of afterlife. Just like Ferguson, the line is funny and cruel, but most of all it's incredibly true. Burnley's defenders, Mike Dean, and his robot assistant all combined to give Everton a lead; Everton contrived to throw it away.

That, perhaps, leaves Burnley out of the story in a way that isn't quite fair. It takes two to football. Nathan Collins and Jay Rodriguez were recalled to the line-up and both chipped in with a goal, as did Maxwel Cornet, given the left-wing and license to attack. If Burnley stay up, then Cornet won't win player of the season. That's not how the awards work. But he should.

It's now been a couple of weeks since Lampard turned on his own players, asking them through the media if they had "the b******s" to play for Everton. Since then they've lost twice away from home, and their next four fixtures come against Manchester United, Leicester City, Liverpool and Chelsea. Burnley, now just a point behind, are off to Norwich at the weekend. Everton could be in the relegation zone by Sunday evening, and on this showing, anybody confident that they'll get out of it is talking a load of Lampards.

It can sometimes feel as if the whole world exists for just one single purpose: to feed into the Manchester United manager race. PSG lost to Real Madrid? Oh, that won't help Pochettino's case. Russia has invaded Ukraine? Hey, maybe Thomas Tuchel will be looking for a new job.

You can understand this, of course. The state of Manchester United, at once the biggest and the dumbest football club, is one the most compelling soap operas around: a heady blend of Succession and the Book of Job. Bad decision follows bad decision, huge piles of money are burned away, ego headbutts ego, and one poor soul is made to carry the blame for everything that happens above and below him. Little children hold magnifying glasses above ants to watch them squirm and catch fire in the heat and the light; the rest of us make do with the United men's team dugout.

The very best of luck to Erik Ten Hag!

According to reports — credit to ESPN, who went first — we're at the "set to finalise" stage, which is more or less Ten Hag's last chance to run screaming into the hills and live out his days in peace. Assuming he doesn't, then he can look forward to the good life: spending a lot of money, settling into a new country, and meeting an exciting collection of fascinating new people. Then reading in the papers how they don't really rate him and wanted the other guy.

An historic win for Villarreal, who beat Bayern 1-0 and could have had more, should have had more, and will almost certainly regret the fact that they didn't. Credit for that goes in large part to Alphonso Davies, who runs so fast he seems to be glitching.

Our thanks to Twitter user @Stillberto for sending this drifting across the bird-faced hellsite yesterday. It can, at times, be frustrating to see a goalkeeper fail to make any kind of effort to save a penalty. Here it became a matter of health and safety, albeit a brief one, and Júlio César did the right thing. Could have taken an arm off.

Yesterday, with great prescience, the Guardian published an interview with Arnaut Danjuma. And later that evening, with the kind of timing that all football writers dream about, Danjuma went and scored the only goal of the game against Bayern Munich.

The quote in the headline reads "It’s fair and factual to say I’m among the best wingers in the world." But as Jacob Steinberg notes in his piece, there's "no hint of arrogance" about him, and the numbers are on his side. He's also got plenty good to say about Unai Emery, whose vision tempted him to Villarreal in the first place. "We’ve got Unai Emery as the captain leading the ship and he always comes up with a masterplan. When you play Juventus in the away leg you know if you don’t concede they will get a bit impatient. We knew an opportunity would present itself. That’s what happened – what Unai predicted."

Europa time! RB Leipzig vs Atalanta! Bodø/Glimt v Roma! Exclamation marks! Leicester City vs PSV! Eintracht Frankfurt vs Barcelona! Shouting! West Ham vs Lyon! Loud noises!