3.47pm BST
This is one of the stranger rivalries in European football, chronologically speaking. The clubs first met the 1981 final, Alan Kennedy scoring from an absurd angle as Liverpool lifted their third European Cup. They didn’t meet again for the best part of three decades, at which point Rafa Benitez’s side won home and away in the Champions League last 16, Andrea Dossena putting the icing on the cake of a 5-0 aggregate thrashing. At this point, Real were very much Barcelona to Liverpool’s Dundee United.
It couldn’t last, though, and since then the clubs have met on four occasions, Real winning the lot. Brendan Rodgers effectively threw in the towel in the 2014-15 groups by leaving Steven Gerrard out at the Bernabeu; in the 2018 final Loris Karius literally threw ... but there’s nothing to be gained by reliving that again. Then last week at the Estadio Alfredo Di Stefano, Liverpool dominated possession and made exactly 100 more passes than their hosts, but were nevertheless comprehensively dismantled 3-1 thanks to a combination of shoddy defending and Vinicius Junior’s clinical brilliance.
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