Karim Benzema breaks Chelsea hearts with extra-time winner for Real Madrid

It was a Champions League mission that was supposed to be impossible for Chelsea. And yet it was one that they thought they had pulled off. They had refused to wallow when, two goals to the good thanks to Mason Mount and Antonio Rüdiger, they were cruelly denied by a VAR overrule after Marcos Alonso thought that he had made it 3-0 in the 62nd minute.

Instead, Timo Werner did make it 3-0. For so many reasons, it had to be the cult hero forward and, if the travelling fans struggled to make sense of it all – utterly lost in the moment – they were not the only ones.

To put the size of the challenge that Chelsea had faced into some sort of perspective, only one club had ever overturned a two-goal deficit from a home first-leg in the Champions League knock-out rounds. That was Manchester United in 2019 against a Paris Saint-Germain team managed by, you guessed it, Thomas Tuchel.

The problem was that Real Madrid were not finished. They never are. If they have 13 European Cups, they seem to have almost as many lives in the competition every season. They dug out the equaliser when Luka Modric unfurled a sumptuous outside-of-the-boot pass for the substitute, Rodrygo, to volley home although, even then, Chelsea might have pinched it after the 90 minutes were up. Twice, the substitute, Christian Pulisic, blazed high when well placed.

Real would fashion what proved to be decisive blow in the early running of extra time. When Vinícius Júnior stood up a cross from the left, Karim Benzema – Real’s hat-trick hero of the first-leg – melted away from Rüdiger and the Chelsea defender could only turn in horror, slipping as he tumbled over, powerless to prevent what was coming, Benzema buried the header.

Chelsea refused to go quietly, just as