Real Madrid's comeback at Liverpool astounding even by their extraordinary standards

For their 37th match of a season of exhausting schedules, Real Madrid went to Anfield with their captain, Karim Benzema, struggling for fitness.

Their best launcher of counter-attacks, Toni Kroos, was too unwell with gastroenteritis to board Monday's plane to Merseyside with his teammates. Neither of their squad’s most expensive footballers, Eden Hazard (out of form) or Aurelien Tchouameni (ill) were in the starting line-up.

Madrid were also without their regular left back, the injured Ferland Mendy, to mark Mohamed Salah. They then lost his replacement, David Alaba to a thigh problem with two-thirds of the first leg of their Champions League tie against Liverpool still to play. Madrid were losing 2-0 after 14 minutes.

What happened in the next 51 minutes was astounding. But perhaps it ought not to have been. The wisest forecaster of what would have been a breathtaking turnaround even if it hadn’t happened at Anfield, a genuine European fortress, was probably Jurgen Klopp.

The day before his side gave up their two-goal lead for a 5-2 defeat, Klopp had told reporters: “Real Madrid don’t lose confidence. I don’t think you make this team panic.”

Not even when their goalkeeper, Thibaut Courtois, man of the match when Liverpool lost the Champions League final to Madrid last May, makes the sort of unforced error, the ball bobbling off his knee, that gifted Salah Liverpool’s second goal. Not even when Madrid escaped conceding another in the first half thanks only to a desperate goalline clearance from Eder Militao.

So habitual is the so-called ‘remontada’, the comeback, for Madrid in Europe there’s a temptation to imagine they fall behind as part of a deliberate tease, a taunt aimed at upstarts like Paris Saint-Germain or