Club World Cup: Thomas Tuchel, Leonardo Jardim and a bomb attack that shocked football

Almost every time Leonardo Jardim, whose Al Hilal meet the Champions of Europe on Wednesday, comes across Thomas Tuchel, the manager of Chelsea, the circumstances are less than ideal.

Covid restrictions in Abu Dhabi oblige Tuchel to oversee his first Club World Cup fixture remotely, communicating from afar with his assistants Zsolt Low and Arno Michels.

The first time Tuchel and Michels took on a Jardim side, also with high stakes, far graver safety issues shaped events.

It was April 2017 and Jardim was in charge of a dashing Monaco. They were setting the pace in a French Ligue 1 where the front-runners are normally assumed to be Paris Saint-Germain.

Jardim’s team had just knocked Manchester City out of the Champions League, an achievement that earned a quarter-final against Borussia Dortmund, then being coached by Tuchel, with Michels alongside him.

As the bus carrying the Dortmund players and staff travelled to the Westfalenstadion, a bomb was detonated by the side of the road, causing injuries to a policeman, and, as a window shattered, to the Dortmund defender Marc Bartra.

The match - the first leg of the tie - was postponed, though only until the next day, much to Tuchel’s disgust. He saw the psychological impact on his players of the frightening blast, which had deliberately targeted the Dortmund bus. The bomb was planted, a court later found, by a man seeking to profit from a sharp, sudden fall in Dortmund’s share value.

Monaco won the rearranged fixture 3-2, and would go on to extend their margin of victory with a 3-1 win in the second leg. Though the outcome of that tie was always coloured by the horrific prelude, there was no question that Jardim had fashioned an exceptional Monaco team.

That was the Monaco