Why did they need to have a draw for this preliminary knockout round of the Champions League? Why couldn’t they just have the 9th-place team play the 24th-place team, the 10th-place against the 23rd-place, and so on? I get that UEFA doesn’t want teams tanking their last matches to gain some competitive advantage, but wasn’t playing the entire last round of games at the same time supposed to prevent that? Anyway, while the top 8 teams sat at home and rested (or, in Liverpool’s case, played a makeup league match against Everton), here’s the action from European soccer’s version of the wild-card playoff round.
Champions League winners
Real Madrid
After their come-from-behind 3-2 win at the Etihad, all they have to do is draw in the return fixture in Madrid to advance.
Erling Haaland
It doesn’t matter if Real Madrid are out of form, two goals against los merengues is what it is. Earlier this season when Haaland was struggling to find the net, people were saying the Norwegian was just another version of Andy Carroll. Where are they now?
Weston McKennie
U-S-A! U-S-A! After a scrum in front of PSV’s goal, the ball popped out to the Juventus midfielder, who launched an unstoppable shot that painted the top corner. That opened the scoring in Juve’s 2-1 win.
Vangelis Pavlidis
It’s that man again! After his hat trick against Barcelona, the Benfica striker bagged the only goal in a 1-0 win at Monaco, where he latched onto Tomás Araújo’s through-ball and coolly chipped the ball over Radosław Majecki to start the second half. (This after he hardly touched the ball in the first half, too.) He’s given his team a sizable advantage for the return fixture in Lisbon.
Croatians
Ivan Perišić launched a spectacular strike for PSV that reminded the Juventus fans of his glory days at Inter Milan, while Mario Pašalić headed in Davide Zappacosta’s cross for Atalanta against Club Brugge. Too bad their scoring efforts were both in losing causes. All the same, hrvatska!
Champions League losers
Mike Maignan
France’s starting goalkeeper let in a bad one for AC Milan, as Igor Paixão’s shot went underneath him and kicked up into the roof of the net for the only goal in the loss to Feyenoord. Milan’s flat attack deserves some blame, too, but Maignan is the one who made the difference, and he can’t blame it on the rain in Rotterdam.
Halil Meler
The Turkish ref gave a cotton-soft penalty in stoppage time after Atalanta defender Isak Hien’s fingers brushed the face of Club Brugge’s Gustaf Nilsson and the Swedish attacker went down like his eye had been put out. Nilsson then converted the spot kick to give his Belgian team the win, and Atalanta coach Gian Piero Gasperini was rightly furious. And yes, Meler is the same ref who got assaulted and hospitalized by Ankaragücü’s team president 15 months ago, which temporarily stopped all the matches in the Turkish league.
Manchester City
The bad, defensively porous City of this season reared its ugly head again and turned a 2-1 lead in the 76th minute into a 3-2 loss at home. Making up one goal at the Bernabéu isn’t impossible, but this City team doesn’t seem to have the juju for it.
Sporting Lisbon
They outplayed Borussia Dortmund for long stretches at the Stadium of Light, but clinical finishing gave the German side a 3-0 win on the road. They may be able to duplicate the feat in Dortmund, but a three-goal deficit is a mountain to make up.
The new Champions League format
In the old days, teams from the same country never would have faced each other this early, but the draw in the new format had Paris St.-Germain facing Brest in a battle of teams familiar with each other, and the result was a boring 3-0 win for PSG.
Ray Hudson
CBS’ Scottish announcer so wanted Celtic to win, didn’t he? For a few glorious moments, it looked like the Hoops had opened the scoring against Bayern Munich, but Kühn Maeda’s goal was called back for offside. It actually would be cool if Celtic were to take down the German giants, and Daizen Maeda’s late goal gives them some hope. We like Ray Hudson (remember him after one Lionel Messi goal: “He has the DNA of a giant Bengal tiger god man!”?), but we can do without his homerism in these games.
Al-Musrati and Ángel di María
For different reasons, they both got early showers in the Monaco-Benfica game. The Libyan defensive midfielder was given a second yellow card for diving, and while you can argue that one, the fact that he was already on a yellow should have made him play more circumspectly. His expulsion ended Monaco’s hopes of equalizing. As for the World Cup-winning di María, he went into the game in the 67th minute as a substitute, but then pulled a hammy and had to come out in the 84th. It’s never fun to be subbed out as a sub.