Dejected United leave Rome in ruins | Night to remember for Barcelona | Ronaldo and Co lose their way | Debate: Did Ferguson get his tactics wrong? | How Barcelona rated | How United rated | How the action unfolded | Rooney: we lost to best team | Henry reaps reward with new friends | Simon Barnes | Patrick Barclay | Giles Smith | Tony Cascarino | Key moments | Graphic: errors cost United dear

For this they suspended Britain’s Got Talent. Just for one evening, mind, but even so. It takes a brave football match to step between the nation and its nightly dose of left-field opera singers, hyperactive street-dancing troupes and worryingly focused escapologists willing to die on a burning rope for fame.

“So, Manchester United, what are you here to do?” “We’re here to play football.” “And do you think you’ve got what it takes to win a slot on the Royal Variety Performance in front of the Queen?” “We’ll do our best.” “Good for you.” And then what happened? Ten minutes of adept performance, exactly as rehearsed, an abrupt and unavoidable setback and the collapse of all confidence.

We’ve seen it so often before when the live shows start. Unthinkably, it was Ryan Giggs who ended up being the night’s Jamie Pugh — the shyness-crippled warehouseman, entirely overwhelmed by the scale of the occasion. Nobody was predicting that.

So what would the judges have made of it? Amanda Holden would have cried and said something that revealed she didn’t understand what she had just seen. Simon Cowell would have said that it didn’t really go anywhere and couldn’t they have come on in cars or something — something a bit, you know, different? But then, as Piers Morgan perfectly put it the other night, Cowell doesn’t really understand variety and is only interested in “stick insects singing You Raise Me Up”. As for Morgan, he would have buzzed after ten minutes when the goal by Samuel Eto’o went in, in an attempt to bring it to an end right there. But that’s because he’s an Arsenal fan.

“Dream final” was the buzz-phrase, but it depended if you had dreamt of seeing Barcelona with a patched-up back four. That little pre-match detail seemed to promise a somewhat lopsided dream. All the more amazing, then, that it panned out the way it did, with the patched-up back four barely stretched.

The delivery of the trophy to the pitch beforehand by a girl wearing a giant ice-cream cornet — now that did seem to be something out of a dream, albeit the kind of dream caused by an excess of strong cheese. Ditto the moment when David Pleat, alongside Clive Tyldesley in the ITV commentary box, was able to report, after a conversation with the Manchester United goalkeeping coach, that Cristiano Ronaldo has “the most flexible ankles in football”. These are the kind of things we need to know.

What you end up admiring about ITV, in a way, though, is the opposite — its inflexibility. Other outfits who had reached this stage of the competition might have gone out and brought in a big name with genuine, in-depth experience of top matches in Europe — someone who really knew what they were talking about. But ITV, as ever, chose to stick with the lad who got them there — Andy Townsend. In a game in which, so often, contracts turn out to be barely worth the paper they’re written on, it gladdens the heart.

Over on Sky Sports, the mood seemed possibly even flatter. Or maybe they were just exhausted, having started up a full hour and three quarters before kick-off and — there being no facility for buzzing them off — continued from there. “Manchester United are already here,” a worried Richard Keys remarked at the top of the show. “Have they come too early?” No, Richard: that was you.

Graeme Souness and Ruud Gullit were big on relevant experience, but if ever an evening needed Stavros Flatley it was this one. Maybe if they had stripped off their shirts and danced about a bit, it would come over better. Jamie Redknapp, meanwhile, was, as ever, a sort of inverse Susan Boyle. He looks fantastic but then he opens his mouth and absolutely nothing of any interest comes out.

As ever, in the midst of the hype and excitability, the age-old talent show question lingered: will we remember any of these people a year from now? Well, yes, actually, we will. But that’s football: it will let you down sometimes, but it’s much less fickle than showbusiness.