That’s because they had comprehensively lost 3-1 to Lyon in the previous year’s Turin showpiece. By the time Ewa Pajor and Alex Popp had struck for Wolfsburg, it looked as if, despite their status as clear favourites, the fear of another defeat was playing heavily on the minds of Spain’s champions. 

No one who was there, amid the buoyant, noisy atmosphere, nor anyone watching on TV, could hear the thoughts of Barcelona’s players, eight of whom were in that beaten team a year previously. Retrospectively, however, a couple of Giráldez’s players were happy to capture the mood. 

“In the first half, you’re thinking, ‘What are we doing? How is it possible? This is not our game plan,’” Fridolina Rolfö told Champions Journal after the game. “And then, in the locker room at half-time, we’re all sitting there thinking, ‘We have to do something… we have to change the game.’”

Aitana Bonmatí, meanwhile, ended the match being named the Women’s Champions League Player of the Season, but that prospect seemed a long way off at the break. “Coming back from 2-0 down is difficult – even more so in a final,” she explained. “You start thinking about last year’s mistakes. We were on the ropes. I could recall apologising to our fans after the final last year, promising we would be back. We had to give our all.”

It was simple enough, during the second half, to identify why the pendulum swung back towards Barcelona – who were about to become only the second team, following Wolfsburg in 2014, to overturn a two-goal deficit in the final. Giráldez pushed Rolfö far higher up the left wing, from full-back to winger, moved Salma Paralluelo inside to play as a false No9 and redeployed Mariona Caldentey deeper in midfield, which created the superiority of numbers that the modern Barça teams, men’s and women’s, perpetually crave. 

What all of us watching had to guess at, before it became evident, was whether Barcelona, finalists in four of the last five Champions League seasons, would have enough of the ‘right stuff’ to ensure that this became a contest. So it proved, as a quick-fire double from Patri Guijarro and Rolfö’s winner secured the club’s second European crown.

Days later, once the trophy had been lifted and the celebrations had hit their raucous peak, Giráldez sat down and spoke, analytically, about what happened to light the blue touchpaper for one of this competition’s all-time 45-minute performances.