Chicken fun lifts spirits as Pellegrini breaks duck
WALKING between Manchester City’s i mpressive acade my and the Etihad s t adium last night, one of the home supporters appeared wearing a rubber chicken on his head. Clearly, Kiev were in town.
Humour is one of the few things that hasn’t changed in seven-and-a-half years of transformation at City.
Elsewhere, however, this club continues to evolve; to break new ground. Last night, they reached the quarterfinals of the Champions League for the first time.
They seem a while ago now, those days when City took their first, tentative steps in this competition and fell flat on their faces: two years spent trying in vain to get out of the group stage, followed by two more poking their noses into the last 16 only to have the door to Europe’s elite slammed shut by the brutal brilliance of Barcelona.
That’s the price you pay for finishing runners-up in qualifying, as Arsenal are now finding out.
The draw has not always been kind to City and there have been some lows along the way, notably when they finished the second Champions League campaign bottom of a group that, in all fairness, included Real Madrid, Borussia Dortmund and Ajax.
By and large, though, they have kept moving in one direction. Forward.
Last night they took another significant, albeit shaky, step. Holding a 3-1 lead from the first leg in Ukraine, Manuel Pellegrini’s side had enough of an advantage to absorb the early exit of both starting centre-backs, Vincent Kompany and Nicolas Otamendi, and get over the line against Dynamo Kiev.
City look set to be England’s only representatives in the competition when the draw for the last eight takes place on Friday.
Manchester United are long gone, already on their way to slipping out of the Europa League as well. Chelsea have followed. Barring a highly unlikely comeback by Arsenal in the Nou Camp tonight, Arsenal will wave goodbye for another year too.
It is quite a turnaround for City, who lacked the European pedigree to be taken seriously five years ago. They were the poor relations, if it’s possible to say that about a team backed by a Sheik from Abu Dhabi.
Whether they have what it takes to go any further remains to be seen. Unsett l ed by t he loss of Kompany and Otamendi they lacked confidence and conviction last night in a game that should have been so much more comfortable.
It’s already apparent that Pellegrini’s side have struggled against the best in the Premier League this season, picking up six points from 11 games against the rest of the top eight.
As such, their participation in next season’s Champions League is by no means guaranteed unless they can win the thing, and that looks beyond them at this stage with Real Madrid and Paris Saint-Germain already through to the quarter-finals.
Their supporters sense as much. This was another muted, slightly strange, Champions League occasion.
Once again the stadium wasn’t quite full and once again City fans expressed their disaffection with UEFA by booing the official anthem before kick-off.
The mood was certainly not helped by Kompany limping off down the tunnel with a recurrence of his calf problem, soon to be followed by Otamendi.
Many supporters will be cursing Kompany’s loss in the Manchester derby here on Sunday, and the remaining Premier League games this season, far more than the possibility of not having him available in Europe.
Missing their captain and Otamendi, City looked a little lost. Passes went astray, attacks came to nothing, everyone seemed on edge. The Etihad didn’t quite know how to react either. Had Kiev possessed more adventure, they could have seized the initiative and given it a real go. Instead, a team who must have arrived in England suspecting they were already going out didn’t quite know what to do when an unexpected opportunity opened up before them.
City regained a little more composure and fluency in the second half. Yaya Toure (left) sent a free kick just over the bar and Jesus Navas fired against the inside of a post. And that was about it. City go through and, in spite of the disjointed performance, we should not lose sight of that fact.
On a night when the rubber chicken made an appearance, they broke another duck in the Champions League.