CHAMPIONS LEAGUE IS WIDE OPEN AND MANCHESTER CITY HAVE TAKEN CHARGE
▶ For the first time in over a decade, the quarter-finals will not include the champions of England, Spain or Italy
More than five months may have passed in between the coups, but the monuments keep falling.
Liverpool out, ambushed by Atletico Madrid. Juventus toppled, by an upstart Lyon, and Juve’s manager, Maurizio Sarri, immediately sacked 13 days after he and they won Serie A. And Real Madrid sent tumbling by a smarter Manchester City.
For the first time in over a decade, the Champions League’s quarter-finalists will include none of the champions from either England, Spain or Italy.
And although the out-of-joint timeline of this year’s competition meant all domestic prizes had been wrapped up before the European Cup’s knockout phase had moved up its gears, it still looks a very unusual landscape.
For City, it cannot help but look like a huge opportunity.
Whichever club ends up as 2020 European champions, they will have progressed from the last-16 stage, which City passed through via their 4-2 aggregate victory over Madrid on Friday, to glory via just three matches.
If Uefa’s decision to make the quarters and the semis onelegged affairs in the neutral venue of Portugal’s capital Lisbon was a necessary reaction to the coronavirus pandemic, the effect is to convince a group of apparent outsiders that just one short burst of top form could deliver the greatest prize in club football.
The format is novel, and so is the make-up of the so-called “Final 8”. A large majority of the clubs now preparing for Lisbon have never won a European Cup.
While the likes of City and Paris Saint-Germain, who have come under transformative new ownership in the last 12 years, can consider themselves superpowers in the sport, both remain hungry for the status a first Champions League title will bring.
Elsewhere, this is truly the year of the freshmen: Atalanta, in their first-ever season in the Champions League, are still involved while Juventus, whose abrupt dismissal of Sarri immediately after defeat on away goals to Lyon confirms how much of a priority they have made capturing a European Cup, are not.
Upstarts RB Leipzig are potentially three matches from being Europe’s champions, having never previously been beyond a group phase in the competition.
As for Lyon, who meet City at the Jose Alvalade stadium on Saturday, they are no less plucky, against-the-odds survivors than Atalanta and Leipzig. It is 10 years since they made the last eight.
By the end of their defeat in Turin on Friday, they had also achieved something nobody has managed for a decade: they had prevented Cristiano Ronaldo, Juventus’s talisman, progressing to a European Cup quarter-final.
Ronaldo, a Champions League winner with Manchester
United and then four times with Real Madrid and the greatest ever goalscorer in the competition, registered his 170th and 171st European Cup goals against Lyon in Turin.
But once Memphis Depay had put Lyon 1-0 up by converting a disputed penalty, Juventus needed three on the night. Lyon had taken a 1-0 lead to Italy from the first leg, played way back in February.
Ronaldo alone could not break them, and although Lyon spent much of Friday night in retreat, there can only be admiration for their organisation and courage.
Because France’s Ligue 1 season was abandoned due to the public health crisis, with no fixtures played since March, Lyon had just one competitive game to reset themselves, post-lockdown, for the Juve trip. And that was a goalless 120 minutes, lost on penalties, in last Sunday’s French League Cup final against PSG. Juve have played 15 games since Italian football restarted in June.
“I’m really proud of what we showed,” said Rudi Garcia, who took over as Lyon’s manager in October. “We now have to go on to another big achievement. City are the stronger club, we know that. But so were Juve. If our players needed any proof we can be a ‘big team’, they now have it.”
Over in Manchester, after City’s 2-1 win on the night over Madrid, those sentiments were being echoed by Pep Guardiola, City’s manager.
“The big clubs lift the titles,” Guardiola said. “Real Madrid reached the final three times in a row [2016 to 2018]. This shows we can do it. We don’t have a lot of presence in Europe, so it is so important.”
City are European football superpowers, but remain hungry for the status a first Champions League title will bring