Pirlo’s feelings in his autobiography sum this game up so well:

“The Istanbul loss made me want to retire

I thought about quitting because, after Istanbul, nothing made sense any more. The 2005 Champions League final simply suffocated me.

To most people’s minds, the reason we lost on penalties was Jerzy Dudek – that jackass of a dancer who took the mickey out of us by swaying about on his line and then rubbed salt into the wound by saving our spot kicks.

But in time the truly painful sentence was realising that we were entirely to blame.

How it happened I don’t know, but the fact remains that when the impossible becomes reality, somebody’s f***ed up – in this case, the entire team. A mass suicide where we all joined hands and jumped off the Bosphorus Bridge”