It's the only Champions League Final I've ever seen where so many of the questions in the press conferences before the game were about the referee's terrible decisions against Pep's teams in the past, even going as far back to his days at Barcelona.
Lahoz was the referee in that incredibly bent CL fixture against Liverpool a year or two before but he had also screwed Pep over when he was at Bayern too and multiple times in Spain wirh Barcelona.
That's why this isn't a game that bothers me as I knew we weren't winning it as soon as the ref was announced.
I still think the team Pep put out was in response to the referee selection, it was a team who's main strength should have been keeping hold of the ball rather than winning it back, I think Pep and the players knew that any kind of tackle would result in a freekick to Chelsea and probably a card for us so we played Gundogan instead of Fernandinho (who had just come back from injury so probably wouldn't have lasted 90 minutes) and Rodri (who was far from the player he became at that time, check out the comments about him on here from that season, Plodri, etc, etc).
Even afterwards I think it was Mason Mount who said something about how they knew they could be more physical than us, this extra physicality resulted in us losing KDB for at most a yellow card (I can't even remember if Rudiger got that now).
