Mbappé keeps scoring as Madrid beat Leipzig 4-1

France24 reports that José Mourinho’s side got goals from Bernardo Silva, Arda Guler, Mbappé and Yan Diomande, while Tidiam Gomis scored Leipzig’s reply. The scoreline is emphatic, but the distribution says plenty too: Madrid did not need a single route to goal, which is usually when this team starts to feel heavy for an opponent.

Mbappé is still the detail that alters the whole picture. According to France24, he has scored in all three of Madrid’s European matches this season and now has 12 goals in total. Four Madrid scorers on the night suggest range; Mbappé’s run suggests the simplest threat remains intact. Defences can spend a match trying to account for everything, then discover they have not solved the most obvious problem either.

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Alex de Valletta Sports & Culture Correspondent

Alex de Valletta was good enough. A bad tackle at nineteen ended that sentence. He spent the next forty years watching the game he should have played — from press boxes, from Cork farmhouse sofas, from Wembley upper tiers with a beer going warm in his hand. He helped build Football Manager. He saw Freddie Mercury live. He has never married because women ask too many questions. Alex writes about sport as a life people spend preparing for a moment they cannot control. The score matters. What it costs to reach it matters more.

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