Kylian Mbappe eyes Man City weaknesses that Arsenal exposed in Champions League play-off | OneFootball

European giants clash tonight at the Etihad in a potentially defining game

Four times in four seasons now, Real Madrid and Manchester City have met in the knockout stages of the Champions League, and on each of the last three the victors have gone on to lift the trophy. Whoever comes out on top this time, though, will still have some way to go to keep that streak alive.

Where Madrid’s struggles are behind them - they finished the league phase with a rattle, winning three on the spin, and are top of LaLiga - City’s stubbornly remain.

Only Carlo Ancelotti has won more Champions Leagues than Pep Guardiola

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Saturday’s sketchy win over Leyton Orient will have done little to convince Kylian Mbappe and Vinicius Jr that the vulnerabilities exposed a week earlier by Arsenal are not still there. Jude Bellingham, you can imagine, will have taken particular note of Stefan Ortega’s wandering off his line.

Form, though, has been no sort of guide to City this season, with Pep Guardiola using his pre-match press conference to stress again that his team’s desperate campaign has primarily been one grand failure of consistency.

This once grimly predictable outfit now routinely loses games it would previously have won, and none of the numerous corners turned in recent months have yet led to a straight road.

But they also retain an immensely talented playing staff, with winning know-how and a sprinkling of freshly signed talent. In Erling Haaland, too, they have a striker with the finishing power to define a tie, averaging a goal-a-game in his Champions League career, and surely desperate to show it against this opponent above all. In four previous appearances versus Real Madrid, Haaland is yet to score; there is not a team anywhere else on the planet he has faced more often without finding the net.

The Champions League play-offs are Uefa’s Didcot Parkway: somewhere between where you were and where you’re trying to get to

They also have a manager who, for all his flaws and failures in this competition, has still won it as many times as anyone else, bar the man who will sit in the opposite dugout this evening, Carlo Ancelotti.

Placed in combination, those contrasts create a scenario where almost any result - be it a 6-0 Madrid mauling or a 3-0 City victory - would be both surprising and utterly explicable. In a two-legged playoff, who knows, we may even get both.

Still fully eight matches from the final in Munich, Guardiola was unsurprisingly hesitant to talk of this competition as offering an obvious route to salvation for a season that saw the Premier League title surrendered long ago.

There was, though, a time when English teams would routinely offset fallow domestic years with success in Europe. Liverpool won the Champions League in 2005, when finishing fifth, and were only one place higher in England when reaching the final again two years on. In between, Arsenal were runners-up to Barcelona in the year they snuck into fourth on account of an iffy lasagne at Spurs. Chelsea were champions of Europe in 2012 but only sixth in the Premier League, behind Alan Pardew’s Newcastle.

Erling Haaland has never scored against Real Madrid in four outings

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Squads now are bigger, and so singular focus in the run-in months is not quite the advantage it could occasionally prove.

But could this City be a throwback in becoming what was once termed, without backhanded compliment, a specialist cup team? Or perhaps better posed: could they prove themselves to still be the cup team of old, even having folded as a dominant force in the league?

Could they, in other words, be like the Real Madrid of a decade ago, who won four Champions Leagues in five seasons while only once ruling their own roost? They will have to slip by this iteration just to reach the last-16 first.

The biggest - and, if you exclude pending legal cases, maybe only - critique of Guardiola’s City tenure has been the failure to win the Champions League more often with what has been a stream of outstanding teams. Doing so this season with a bad one would go some way to redressing the balance.