For the first time in this season’s new Champions League, players and managers are using one of those definitive football terms about a fixture. Pep Guardiola described Manchester City’s match with Club Brugge as “our final”. Unai Emery has been saying similar about Aston Villa’s home game against Celtic, with Luis Enrique echoing as much ahead of Paris Saint-Germain’s showdown in Stuttgart.
There is finally clarity about what teams need to do, which hasn’t always been the case in this new group stage. Many players found the middle of the campaign quite strange, because the open format meant the stakes of any individual match weren’t obvious. No more.
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