The climax of the European season arrives tomorrow at Istanbul’s Ataturk Olympiat Stadium where England’s Liverpool takes on Italy’s AC Milan in the Champions League final. Between them, these two teams have played in 14 finals: Milan has won the trophy six times, Liverpool four times, but this will be the first time they have ever faced each other.

What to expect from this heavyweight clash? For those looking for a feast of high-level attacking soccer, the omens are downright lousy. Milan, after all, is an Italian club, and for decades the top Italian clubs have made defense the name of their game. They’re very good at it, and they do it with skill and some style. They know how to shut down opponents, how to squeeze the life out of a game.

Just two years ago, that philosophy reached some sort of high point in a Champions league final that featured two Italian teams. This was Tedium Enthroned. Of course it was 0-0, of course it went to overtime, and then to penalty kicks. Juventus lost in the shootout … to AC Milan.

It is possible that this season’s Milan is slightly more offense-minded than the 2003 edition, though the proof is unconvincing. Milan still has Carlo Ancelotti as coach, and tomorrow it could start as many as nine of the same players who featured in that 2003 travesty. One key addition, however, just might make the difference: the brilliant 23-year-old playmaker, Kaka.

He’s Brazilian, of course – most of the game’s top playmakers are these days – and he lines up alongside Andrea Pirlo, one of Italy’s best young attacking midfield talents, and the Ukrainian Andriy Shevchenko, Europe’s most deadly finisher. Such a formidable attacking trio ought to mean buckets of goals, but that’s not the way Italian soccer works. In its 12 Champions League games this season, Milan has scored only 18 times, just 1.5 goals per game.

That’s more than enough for a team that has conceded only six goals. But the defense is emitting sounds of geriatric creaking: Cafu is 34, Alessandro Nesta 29, Kakha Kaladze 27, and the captain Paolo Maldini is 36. PSV Eindhoven exposed the weakness by scoring three times in the semifinal, and Milan needed a last-gasp 91st-minute away goal by Massimo Ambrosini to scrape into the final.

Is Liverpool the team to exploit defensive flaws? Hardly. The depressing news is that Liverpool has scored even fewer goals than Milan, only 15 in 12 games, while its defense has matched Milan’s in giving up only six. Liverpool’s surprising arrival in the final owed much to two 0-0 ties with Juventus and Chelsea, methodically engineered by Spanish coach Rafael Benitez.

Maybe Liverpool’s lack of scoring can be blamed on the bro ken leg suffered early in the season by Djibril Cisse. The French striker is fit again, which may mean the bench for poor Milan Baros, who has soldiered on alone for so long. Liverpool has also played most of the season without its key midfielder, the Spaniard Xavi Alonso. He’s back again, and provides the perfect subtle counterpart to captain Steven Gerrard’s bustling midfield energy.

But let’s not get carried away. Though Liverpool does indeed like to attack at Anfield, in front of its frenetic fans, the team has averaged just 1.2 goals per home game. Playing away from Anfield, the average is a pathetic 0.7 a game. Milan’s record is not much better: 1 goal per away game. Add in the dampening blanket of pervasive caution that always shrouds important finals, and the possibility of a lively final in Istanbul recedes.

The saving factor, as usual in soccer, is that the sport rarely behaves along logical lines. The Champions League final is one of three cup finals that traditionally round off the season in Europe. The other two – the UEFA cup and the English FA cup – were played last week, and neither went according to predictions.

CSKA Moscow produced a mighty upset in the UEFA Cup, defeating Sporting Lisbon 3-1 to become the first Russian club to win a major European trophy. This despite an absolutely abysmal performance in the first half, after which the clueless Russians slouched to their locker room, extraordinarily lucky to be only 1-0 down. Their luck grew to massive dimensions in the second half as they quickly came up with an undeserved tying goal – a laughably inelegant header from Aleksei Berezoutski that bounced over Sporting goalkeeper Ricardo and then dropped just under the crossbar. The Portuguese swept forward, looking for the goals that would surely confirm their superiority. They didn’t get them. The Russians kept Sporting at bay and finished it off with two perfectly executed counterattack scores.

President Vladimir Putin sent a congratulatory telegram, Prime Minister Mikhail Fradkov spoke of “a historic win”, and coach Valery Gazzayev saw “a new dawn” for Russian soccer. Could be, for Russian soccer now has a capitalist look to it. CSKA, once the official team of the Red Army, today wears shirts bearing the name of its $50-million sponsor, Sibneft, the oil conglomerate whose main shareholder is Roman Abramovich, who has poured millions of dollars into Chelsea.

Russian soccer is also rapidly going international. CSKA’s outstanding player in the final was Daniel Carvalho, one of two Brazilians on the team. The roster also features a Nigerian, a Bosnian, and a Croatian.

Three days after CSKA’s famous victory, Arsenal and Manchester United clashed in the FA Cup final. Even more globalization was on display here, with players from Germany, Switzerland, Brazil, Ivory Coast, Cameroon, the Netherlands, Ireland, Scotland, Spain, Portugal, and France, plus a handful from England – Arsenal included only one English player, United had four.

With Chelsea having swiped the Premiership title, both sides were eager to end the season with a trophy. Arsenal was favored, but United dominated from start to finish through 90 minutes of regular time and 30 minutes of overtime – and couldn’t find the net.

No goals, but the corner-kick tally (12-1 in favor of United) shows which team was doing all the attacking. That score ought to have been used as the tiebreaker. But no, for the first time in its 133-year history the FA cup final went to the lottery of a penalty-kick shoot out, and Arsenal came away with a thoroughly undeserved win.

A trophy-less season for United then, but certainly not an uneventful one. The takeover by American businessman Malcolm Glazer has rocked the club, though the promised demonstrations against Glazer never materialized at the final. Glazer himself was also a prominent no-show. He has yet to be heard from on the matter of just why he has gone to such lengths to acquire United and what his plans are for the club.