When Brahim finished the round of interviews that the MVP forced him to go through and finally reached the locker room, he sat next to Lunin and asked to take a photo of them both holding the trophy. The man from Malaga has just scored a fantasy goal, but the match once morest RB Leipzig was half won by his genius and the Ukrainian’s nine saves.
Lunin had just reached the summit, following a long and discouraging journey. Added to the extreme difficulty of fighting for the position of Courtois, who was among the three best goalkeepers in the world, was the distance from the rest of the squad that marked the Ukrainian’s character, between icy and introverted. He was very far from the expansive Courtois, who both hesitates and shouts on the field or offers lengthy explanations before the cameras of what happened to the team on a compromised night. Lunin, on the other hand, orbited like a satellite somewhat removed from the center of the group, without giving them any reason to have blind faith in him. Until his consecrating task in Leipzig, with echoes of Courtois’s in the 2022 Champions League final: both with nine saves and a clean sheet.
“His best night in the locker room,” says a club source regarding Lunin’s reception following the game in Leipzig. “Spectacular ovation from everyone.” Not only that. The first message that Vinicius wrote in X was for him: “What a great game, Andriy Lunin.” And in the next one he referred to Brahim: “What a player and what a great goal.” Tchouameni also celebrated him, who as an emergency centre-back experienced the joint effort to protect the goal very closely. The Frenchman wrote “Lunin” and placed a sheriff’s star next to it.
The Ukrainian had shown traits of the goalkeeper that Real Madrid thought he might become when they signed him in 2018 following being voted best goalkeeper at the U20 World Cup. “He played an outstanding game,” Ancelotti said. “His best game of his.” Opta released overwhelming information regarding his nine stops. Since they kept records, in the 2003/04 season, only one Madrid goalkeeper had scored so many without conceding a goal: Courtois in the final in Paris. Two goalkeepers in 20 years.
The Belgian has always cast a powerful shadow over Lunin. For months, the coaching staff considered that the Ukrainian felt that he might not compete for the position and that this slowed his progress. They saw him stagnant, which led to hesitant performances that fueled the team’s distrust. Until Courtois tore the cruciate ligament in his left knee. The club immediately recruited Kepa Arrizabalaga, whom they invested as a starter from the first moment. But something had changed. “Kepa is not Thibaut,” Ancelotti’s team told him. And he quickened his pace until he beat the goalkeeper on loan from Chelsea, completing a night in Leipzig that is reminiscent of Courtois’ masterpiece in Paris. Although Lunin is still some distance away from that.
The Belgian’s nine stops involved considerably more complications than those of the Ukrainian. To compare them, the StatsBomb metric that evaluates the difficulty of the shots a goalkeeper faces, the expected goals following the shot (PSxG), helps. In Germany, Lunin faced 0.77 PSxG, meaning each shot had an average difficulty of 0.08 expected goals. This means that shots taken in the same positional circumstances of the attacker, defenders and goalkeeper end in a goal 8% of the time.
In Paris, the situation was much more distressing: Courtois faced 3.48 PSxG, which means that each shot was on average five times more difficult than those faced by Lunin, 0.39 expected goals.
If the shots are reviewed one by one, notable differences are also found. The most difficult shot Lunin encountered was one from Sesko in the 2nd minute with 0.26 PSxG. In Paris, Courtois stopped five that were at least twice as dangerous: 0.70, 0.64, 0.63, 0.59 and 0.51. The three most poisonous were from Salah, especially inspired. But the Egyptian found himself facing a goalkeeper who seemed in a trance. “I felt like no one might score a goal for me today,” he said. The same monster that has stopped Lunin, and that the Ukrainian approached in Leipzig.