Juventus, Real Madrid are about to show us how good (or not) they really

Real Madrid and Juventus meet in the Champions League quarterfinals on Tuesday with questions to be answered about the quality of both sides.

One doesn’t need to work hard to find the parallels between Juventus and Real Madrid’s round of 16 wins, against Tottenham and Paris Saint-Germain respectively. Indeed, the lesson of both ties was identical: Talent, the ability to dominate a match, is meaningless if it isn’t accompanied by the savvy and experience required to win. More than any sides left in this season’s Champions League, Real and Juve embody those qualities.

They did so in their own, distinct ways in the round of 16: Juve, in the rugged, stooped form of Giorgio Chiellini, hurling his body at shot after Spurs’ shot as time ran out in the second leg, shouting at and punching and otherwise cajoling his teammates, a man, it seemed, truly on the brink.

This was calcio at its best, ragged and raw and wild and, ultimately, winning. If Juve’s rearguard action in the last half hour against Tottenham wasn’t among your highlights of the tournament — the season, for that matter — you need to stop and think for a moment about why it is you watch this game.

As for Real, they, too, were outplayed for long stretches of the first leg, running out 3-1 winners thanks to two goals from Cristiano Ronaldo and one from Marcelo. In the second leg, whether as a result of Neymar’s absence or not, PSG capitulated. This was taken as evidence of the difference between a side like Real, bona fide European royalty, and Les Parisiens, wealthy, talented, but lacking where it really counts. There’s certainly something to this, and its merits as a narrative are further enhanced by the general unsavoriness of the PSG project, but as this quarterfinal draw attests, experience was only ever going to take Real so far.

And so it is, on the brink of a quarterfinal tie between the two most experienced groups of winners in Europe, there remains a sense we don’t yet know exactly how good either of these sides are on the pitch.

Real have had a strange year, stumbling through the first half of the Liga season and finishing second to Tottenham in their Champions League group. The suggestion their recent improvement was all part of the plan, a sign they only really get going at the business end of the season, would be a lot more convincing if they hadn’t dropped out of the title race in December and been knocked out of the Copa del Rey (by Leganes, no less) in January. The Champions League may hold a special place in their hearts, but their league form can’t be dismissed: They aren’t as good as they were last season.

Ronaldo is scoring again, of course, but as disturbing a prospect as that presumably is for his opponents, this new version of Ronaldo is only as good as the service he gets, and the midfield pass-opoly of Luka Modric and Toni Kroos has often been worse than its robotically dominant best this season, as most recently evidenced by a sloppy pair of games against PSG. Isco, meanwhile, marvelous player though he is, spent the international break taking veiled shots at his manager, and may leave the Bernabeu this summer.

This isn’t to say Real can’t still dominate a match, or even win the tournament, but there are signs of a certain brittleness, a sense of unease, that didn’t used to be there. Whether this is the comedown that tends to follow a sustained period of dominance or a sign of an aging squad or something else entirely doesn’t really matter; it’s there.

Juve, meanwhile, are in the same place they always are domestically: top of Serie A, four points ahead of Napoli on the way to a seventh consecutive scudetto. Still, while they might yet break their own record points total, this hasn’t been the procession it often is, and not only because of Napoli’s excellent form.

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Juve’s 3-1 win against AC Milan on the weekend felt emblematic. They were second best for long stretches, soaking up an uncomfortable amount of pressure at home, before two late, counter-attacking goals secured the win. And then there were the much more concerning performances against Tottenham. Say what you will about their mental fortitude, the unerring cool with which they took their chances, Massimiliano Allegri can’t have been pleased with the fact his midfield were completely outplayed by Tottenham’s. Miralem Pjanic, Sami Khedira and, in the second leg, Blaise Matuidi, were overrun at times by Mauricio Pochettino’s high press.

Winning makes up for a lot, but it’s a manager’s job to focus on performances, and there was a lot for Allegri to worry about in both performances against Spurs. Juve walk the line between victory and disaster with more panache than any side in the world, but if anyone’s capable of walking it with them, it’s Los Blancos.

That, really, is what makes this quarterfinal so intriguing. The qualities to which we attributed these side’s round of 16 wins will, or should, cancel each other out. There’s no learning curve here, no matchup of youth and experience, no contrast between old money and new. The are likely to be only two starters, Paolo Dybala and Raphael Varane, under the age of 25. In the past four seasons, the two clubs have failed to make this stage of the tournament only once between them.

If the round of 16 was played for these clubs in some meaningful sense between the ears, then, this tie will be played very much on the pitch. And so, strange as it is to say of two sides with which we’re all so familiar, this might be our first chance all season to get a sense of how good they really are.