Football can be cruel, sometimes. One minute you are receiving a hero's welcome as you return to universal acclamation, focused on lifting the biggest prize in South American football. The next minute, or better said next minutes, all of your best-laid plans are in tatters.
For someone as ill-accustomed to failure as Marcelo Gallardo, that must be a bitter pill to swallow indeed.
Not that the River Plate coach is unused to adversity. Under his watch the Millonario have faced daunting odds and overcome them on countless occasions, most famously in the 2018 Copa Libertadores final against Boca Juniors where the club trailed twice in the first leg, saw their own match wrested away from the Monumental and moved halfway across the world and then went behind again in Madrid before ultimately prevailing.
But the manner of Tuesday's defeat, which leaves River's Copa Libertadores dreams hanging by a thread, is something Gallardo and his men will struggle to get their heads around. Defeat is nothing new; the comprehensive manner of their capitulation, though, is an added injury that will resonate across Núñez long past the final whistle.
There were no excuses. El Muñeco's expensively assembled, hand-picked champions were dismantled by Atlético Mineiro in a first leg which was overwhelmingly one-sided. At every juncture the coach was out-fought and out-thought by his counterpart, Gabriel Milito, who had won just one of their last seven clashes from the bench.
“Not a single part of what we planned or tried to put together before the game came together,” Gallardo lamented after the match. “When it doesn't flow, it is hard to analyse because nothing of what we had thought to do came out on the pitch.”
This was no smash-and-grab victory. Milito packed his team with six in midfield, suffocating River in an area of the pitch they are used to dominating. Such was Mineiro's domination that Gallardo was obliged to remove his entire midfield trio before the hour mark, with Nicolás Fonseca and Nacho Fernández in particular demoralised after chasing shadows for most of the game to that point.
But in his desperation to turn the tide and get a foothold in the Estadio Mineirão, the coach’s changes only served to push the tie further out of reach. The superlative Deyverson, who saw an early header ruled out for offside before opening the scoring in the first half, was then allowed to run riot, and added another 70 minutes in before teeing up Paulinho for the hosts' third goal of the evening.
A one-goal deficit would have been difficult but attainable to overcome in the Monumental thus turned into a frightful beating in the blink of an eye, leaving River needing a miracle to reach their first Libertadores final since 2019.
As we noted above, they are no stranger to adversity. But this time feels different. This is not the dominant Gallardo team of four or five years ago, who could always be counted on for one more goal to at least push an opponent to the brink. This side has stuttered from the start of his second spell, winning just five of the 14 games they have contested in all competitions and without a single Liga Profesional for an entire month. Even that feted Libertadores aura barely got River past a less than mighty Colo Colo team in the last round, scant return for a club that opened its chequebook over the winter for the return of its prodigal son.
While one should never count Gallardo or River out of the running, Tuesday's disaster demonstrated that the scale of the task ahead of the coach is far greater than he could have imagined upon taking his old post just three months ago.
