More than five months after the first steps, comes the second. Before the focus on Lisbon and the final results of this season’s exclusive and pandemic Champions League, there are 4 matches from the last 16 games, which began at the end of February, which must be completed. Four superclubs are in danger and at least one is guaranteed to leave.
The intriguing link between Manchester City and Real Madrid, with Man City 2-1 on the way to Madrid. City was right in the first leg, betting with pragmatism to win 2-1, possibly their first primary European role of the Sheikh Mansour era. The only challenge was that the bottom idea probably didn’t want to be as careful as it did at first, and that betting on his overall adventure opposed to a Madrid report may have brought a more comfortable victory that would well have ended with the series there. Then.
But Real Madrid is now a very different team to Real Madrid than it was then. He returned from unemployment with a much more confident team defensively, completing the Spanish name with 10 consecutive victories, with six blank leaves in the first 8 of those games. Karim Benzema and Casemiro have achieved good moments of form. Thibaut Courtois, after a precarious start in life in Spain, looks like a goalkeeper who prevails. Marco Asensio fits with a damaging creator.
City, meanwhile, remains the look it has had all season, exceptional on the property but vulnerable if a team can get through the press. The way Madrid calms down, interrupts the game, interrupts the opponent’s speed and seeks to make his way to victory is exactly how a team would be set up to thwart City. The absence of the sanctioned Sergio Ramos probably still gives The City a lead, even if he lacks a reliable striker while Sergio Aguero recovers from knee surgery, but seems much thinner in balance than in February.
Juventus and Barcelona are also in danger. La Juve lost 1-0 to Lyon in the first leg and won Serie A for the ninth consecutive time, has not played well this season. It lacks fluency and gives the feeling that everything has to go through Cristiano Ronaldo.
This gives Lyon hope, even if he has only played one competitive match since the lockdown, thanks to the French league’s resolve to leave the season. This attack was a penalty shootout defeat to Paris Saint-Germain in the League Cup final, but more vital than the final result is the way he defended the 0-0 draw in 120 minutes. Similar functionality is required in Turin, and if you can only score a away goal, and the return of the Memphis Depay injury, which would not have played the back match as originally planned, makes it more likely, then Lyon has a real chance of progress.
Barcelona scored a goal at home in the first leg, drawing 1–1 with Napoli, which probably makes a clash less likely. But she has also fought since the reboot, Quique Setien appears at every moment as the unfortunate instructor who ends up passing up elegance and doing what he wants. The lead of Antoine Griezmann, Luis Suarez and Lionel Messi continues to find a way to succeed in mutual understanding, while the midfield disorders that have ravaged Barcelona in the big matches for years have not been resolved.
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Napoli, for his part, took a step forward under Gennaro Gattuso, has been inconsistent since the resumption, and the feeling will have to be that if he were to progress he needed a result in the first place. That said, no one really knows how the merit of the house will spread without enthusiasts in two-person links, so there would possibly be an additional point of randomness in those games.
However, nothing can be random enough to save Chelsea, 3-0 after the home game against Bayern Munich. Its position is and not only because of the elegant hole between the sides. If Chelsea want to arrange an unlikely comeback, they will have to attack, and do so without the injured Christian Pulisic and right-back César Azpilicueta, but that will reveal them to the kind of counterattacks That Bayern is so willing to do and to which Chelsea have been so vulnerable all season. In general circumstances, Bayern could have been simple here, but after completing their domestic season a month ago, they want a competitive fit to prepare them for the quarter-finals.
All clubs in action on Friday and Saturday are in one aspect of the playoff, with the Winner of the Man City-Real Madrid facing the winner of Juventus-Lyon and the Barcelona-Napoli survivor almost in fact facing Bayern. The other aspect features PSG against Atalanta and RB Leipzig against Atletico Madrid, all quarter-final rounds being played in a singles draw in Portugal.