You really do have to hand it to Manchester City. They aren’t the only big team that’s put their heart and soul into making this new Champions League format vaguely interesting, but they have been the most firmly committed to the bit.
And they remained so until almost the very last moment. Real Madrid and Bayern Munich lost their nerve some time ago and made sure of play-off spots. Even PSG didn’t hold course until the very end.
Man City, though. They were true heroes of the format. They dug themselves deeper and deeper until the final half of the final game before staging their blushes-sparing escape act.
The specifics of a game against a lively Club Brugge side – who also snuck into the play-off round despite this defeat – are incidental really. This was a big-picture kind of night, one that required keeping tabs on 18 simultaneous games in one competition which even we, as sport-without-jeopardy”>harsh critics of this format, had to concede brought a kind of dizzying and confusing buzz.
Was it actually good? Don’t really know. But it was certainly different. For all the permutations elsewhere, City actually had a relatively simple task. Win.
This clearly presented a challenge to a team that has been so determined to live in interesting times this season. They rose to that challenge magnificently with a listless first half that didn’t exactly scream ‘must-win’ and ended with Matheus Nunes confirming he is no right-back as the Belgians took a shock lead into the break.
City, it must be acknowledged, were far better in the second half. They had to be, they could hardly fail to be, but better they were.
Mateo Kovacic ran unopposed through several acres of turf where a Club Brugge midfield ought to have been before finishing smartly from the edge of the box to bring City level, and Josko Gvardiol continued his entertainingly unexpected yet seemingly inexorable rise to become City’s most reliable attacking outlet by forcing an own goal.
When Savinho added a third you sensed that even City couldn’t make a bollocks of it from here, and so it proved.
But City haven’t finished saving the Champions League from itself.
We’re still not quite sure why there’s a draw for the play-off round at all rather than it just being 9th v 24th, 10th v 23rd and so on. It’s not to allow UEFA to fiddle it where need be to prevent teams from the same country playing each other, or even teams who have already played each other. We’ve checked, and both those things absolutely are allowed to happen in the punishment round.
QUIZ: Can you name the 36 Champions League teams in the league phase?
It may well be as simple as UEFA just really, really liking a big draw event with all little plastic footballs and big goldfish bowls and assorted legends from the 90s and noughties standing awkwardly for several minutes as four people attempt to hold a conversation in what is, at best, a second language for all of them.
And you know what? Fair enough.
But what this draw does have is pairing. So while it’s not as simple as 9th v 24th, it is as simple as 9th and 10th being drawn against 23rd and 24th. Which means we now know which section of the draw City find themselves in.
Magnificently – albeit very irritatingly if you want to carry on complaining about this format which we do because it is still crap no matter how lucky UEFA get – the two seeds in City’s section of the draw are… Real Madrid and Bayern Munich. And you can throw another former european champion into the mix as well, because Celtic are the other unseeded team. Just incredibly good nonsense.
Other notable pairings before the draw are the fact PSG will definitely play French opposition in either Monaco or Brest, while there is the possibility of Milan facing Juventus.
The other effect of UEFA’s decision to hold a paired draw for the play-offs and then another to lock in the final last-16 bracket is that they’ve created surely the first league table in recorded history where there is literally not one single solitary advantage to finishing first rather than second.
Traditionally, quite a significant dividing line. But not here. Arne Slot had twigged it, admitting he’d not been sure initially but had correctly in the end surmised that with Liverpool guaranteed to finish second at worst it made not one jot of tangible difference – except to the ol’ coefficient of course – what happened to them in their final game.
They will still be at the mercy of the draw to discover which side of the draw they fall upon, but will be sure of avoiding their fellow top-two finisher until the final.
As it was, Liverpool duly lost to PSV with a much-changed team in which the starting XI boasted an average squad number of 41 despite the absence of Trent Alexander-Arnold and the presence of Wataru Endo letting the side down massively in midfield. And then still ended up top anyway.
It all rather felt like it fell perfectly into UEFA’s hands. A night of superficially high drama, but one that ended with not one major casualty.
