Key events
1 min: Real’s defenders pad their passing stats just shy of midfield.
The referee, Szymon Marciniak of Poland, brought out a young fan to conduct the coin toss but decided he should also flip the coin himself. Hard to tell whether one end is staring into the sun or not, so it likely doesn’t matter.
And TWEET … we’re off!
Service has been restored, so the room is now glittering with the player introductions in front of what looks like the light show at a Metric concert.
Football Daily says the score will be 3-1 Real Madrid, but they didn’t tell me who will score, so I’m keen to see that.
Speaking of storms, a very nasty nearby lightning strike has temporarily (we hope) interrupted my feed of pregame punditry. Eek. This could end up being like the old story of baseball commentators inventing foul balls to delay things when they lost their phone connections to a distant game …
The forecast …
… calls for pain.
Well, not really, but why not give Robert Cray a shoutout today?
It’s apparently 82 degrees F (or just shy of 30 degrees C). The humidity is Florida – in other words, 77%. The “feels like” (wasn’t this formerly called a “heat index”?) is 89. Supposedly, there’s not much chance of a thunderstorm, but it’s Florida, and you may have seen that the USA’s weather forecasting ranks are depleted. Either the radar shows patches of rough weather floating about or I’m paying the price for staring at the sun a little earlier.
Forecasters or no forecasters, summer in Florida means heat, humidity and the occasional “hey, we’ve never seen this in Europe” weather, so we’ll see.
Lineups: Mbappe is …
… not starting but might appear later.
Weston McKennie and Timothy Weah, Juve’s US players who have bypassed a chance to face Guatemala in the Gold Cup semifinals to be in this event are also on the bench.
Real Madrid: Thibaut Courtois; Dean Huijsen, Aurélien Tchouaméni, Antonio Rüdiger; Fran Garcia, Arda Güler, Federico Valverde, Jude Bellingham, Trent Alexander-Arnold; Vinícius Júnior, Gonzalo García.
Fifa’s site believes this to be a 4-4-2 with Alexander-Arnold at the back, but more likely, the former Liverpool man won’t be spending much time near his own goal unless something’s going wrong.
Juventus: Michele Di Gregorio; Lloyd Kelly, Daniele Rugani, Pierre Kalulu; Andrea Cambiaso, Khephren Thuram, Manuel Locatelli, Alberto Costa; Kenan Yildiz, Randal Kolo Muani, Francisco Conceição.
The European squads have been rotating a bit because they think it’s hot in the USA. Speaking of which …
Preamble
Well, this tournament got interesting last night, didn’t it?
For those who didn’t stay up until almost midnight Eastern time or until nearly dawn in Europe, Al-Hilal won the Game of the Century. Each time Manchester City came back to tie the game and steer it toward a penalty shootout in which you would have favored the English titans, Al-Hilal found a goal out of nowhere and reclaimed the lead.
Today? Just two big European teams, one of whom has a couple of players back in their home country of the USA. On paper, Juventus won’t have much of a chance against Real Madrid, but what chance did Al-Hilal have last night? Strange things happen in the heat of the USA.
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