What Donnarumma said before Real penalty vs City
Manchester City goalkeeper Gianluigi Donnarumma denied Vinicius Jr from the penalty spot during the 3-0 defeat to Real Madrid
Gianluigi Donnarumma saved Vinicius Jr’s penalty in Manchester City’s 3-0 defeat to Real Madrid(Image: Manu Reino/DeFodi Images/DeFodi via Getty Images)
Manchester City goalkeeper Gianluigi Donnarumma appeared to play some mind games with Real Madrid winger Vinicius Jr during his side’s 3-0 Champions League round of 16 first-leg defeat. City were blown away in the first half at the Bernabeu as Real captain Federico Valverde scored a 22-minute hat-trick.
Los Blancos had the chance to make it four in the second half when Vinicius Jr was fouled by Donnarumma. As he prepared to take the penalty, Donnarumma appeared to say: “Ha fatto il fenomeno.” This directly translates into English as: “He made the phenomenon.”
While in the literal sense, someone could say this as a compliment, Football Italia reports it is often used sarcastically to mock a player for trying to do too much and show off. Vinicius tried to wrong-foot the goalkeeper from the spot, only for the City man to save it.
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Pep Guardiola’s side were unable to capitalise on the save as Nico O’Reilly was denied by a superb Thibaut Courtois stop. After the match, Guardiola insisted that, despite the scoreline, he was pleased by his team’s performance.
“I think we played quite a good game,” he said. “I think we’ve tried to do our best and we could not create chances where Courtois could not intervene. We got to the box many times and when you were able to do that it means you have followed a good process but we didn’t score.
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“Real Madrid has always been very dangerous but I don’t have the feeling that Courtois has played a great game. He made a parry from Nico in the second half but we have reached that byline many times – six, seven, eight times – so we’ve done a good job, we were just missing this detail.
“If you dominate [Real] you always have this feeling of them being able to run but my feeling about ourselves is we’ve done quite a good job. But because the score is 3-0 that is a little bit useless.”