Sid Lowe

Not entirely, but slightly.

And you do get a sense of people coming for the Champions League games as an occasion, rather than turning up for a routine league match.

I also think that one of the ways to judge this is to look at the first few minutes of the game against Monaco, or indeed look at the warm-up in the game against Monaco.

When the teams came out to first come out onto the pitch and look around an hour or so before the game, there was a kind of a sense of, well...

We had our protest at the weekend.

And I think there was indifference more than anything else.

Then, of course, as the game went on, there were moments in which Real Madrid started to play well.

And that increased the enthusiasm and took away some of the whistles.

And for me, there was a couple of really key moments towards the end of the first half.

One of them was when a pass fell behind Jude Bellingham and he fell on the floor.

And there was kind of applause, kind of a supporting thing that said, all right, come on, we can do this from the crowd.

And then a moment after that, Vinicius Jr.

did what...

I'm afraid to say, was a rather pointless attempt at a pirouette, which went wrong.

And there were some whistles of him.

But that was immediately met by the rest of the crowd with applause and cheers.

And I think there was a conscious sense from the fans at the Bernabeu midweek, okay, we said what we wanted to say at the weekend.

We've got to put that behind us.

And now we play a part in encouraging this team.

And then on top of that, of course, you then get the really, really good performance in which Vinicius is involved in four goals.