Riyad Mahrez scored twice as Man City reached the Champions League final for the first time thanks to a 2-0 win over PSG at the Etihad Stadium on Tuesday; apart from the first 30 minutes of the first leg, when PSG looked very dangerous, City were good value for their 4-1 aggregate victory.
Once again, PSG totally lost their cool when faced with a Champions League loss: Angel Di Maria was sent off in the 69th minute for a stamp on Fernandinho on the sidelines. Several of Di Maria’s team-mates also saw yellow for petulant fouls. In the final 15 minutes, City’s players switched to damage limitation, literally.
7 – Manchester City have won their last seven UEFA Champions League matches; the longest ever winning run by an English team in European Cup/Champions League history. Historic. pic.twitter.com/zpfRj8kLjC
— OptaJoe (@OptaJoe) May 4, 2021
Pep Guardiola’s City side now face either Chelsea or Real Madrid in the final in Istanbul on 29th May. I’d fancy them to beat either of those.
After the final whistle, Pep said: “I’m incredibly proud and my first thoughts are with the players who didn’t play today. They all deserved to play, everyone has made a contribution and now it is time to enjoy it. We have to win the league and we have two or three weeks to prepare for the final.
“They put a lot of players in the middle and we struggled a lot in the first half to high press and we changed at half-time. We recovered the ball better in the second half and we were much better in the way we played and 4-1 on aggregate against a team that beat Barcelona and Bayern Munich means a lot to us.
“People believe it’s easy to arrive in the final of the Champions League. Getting to the final now makes sense of what we have done in the past four or five years.”
Man of the match: Riyad Mahrez (City) – by my reckoning, Mahrez has now been man of the match in both legs against PSG, plus the League Cup final. Amazing form.
Match highlights:
The post Champions League highlights: Man City 2-0 PSG (4-1 agg) – Neymar and co. self-destruct again first appeared on Who Ate all the Pies.
