Arguably the finest night of football so far this season awaits us. Here’s our preview of the first leg of the Champions League quarter-finals.
The Champions League is the best club competition in football because of nights like this. Okay, the final eight may not contain any clubs from the Premier League but any football fan worth their salt will be glued to the TV tonight.
Four fantastic sides (well three and PSG to be 100 per cent accurate) are in action tonight and some of the best footballers on the planet (plus David Beckham) will be strutting their stuff.
Let’s make like Kanye and Jay Z and chat about Paris for a while. The meeting of ‘nouveau riche’ PSG and ‘More Than A Club’ Barca couldn’t be more of a contrast. In the space of a few years PSG have propelled themselves to this level backed with massive resources from Qatar. Barcelona are, as they like to remind us a lot, the living embodiment of Catalan culture and style, though they have a little help from Qatar these days too.
That’s just one plotline though. There’s Zlatan Ibrahimovic with a point or two to prove against the club that didn’t want him. There’s Barca’s desire to show that the blip in recent form is just that and there’s the spectre of Beckham attempting to shuffle into the limelight once again.
But we will be keeping an eye on Lionel Messi. The little fella has just scored in 19 consecutive league games, one against every club in La Liga and the PSG defence, not tested too sternly in the calmer waters of Ligue 1, will have a torrid time trying to stop him.
With Thiago Motta out, PSG may be forced to deploy Beckham around the middle, meaning that Xavi and Iniesta will have acres of space to operate in, though Ibra will be happy that Carlos Puyol won’t be around to keep tabs on him either.
No Carlos
Because of these frailties expect the goals to flow in the Parc des Princes tonight, but we also expect Barcelona to return home with a healthy away goals lead.
However, it says something about how good the other tie tonight is that we are willing to ignore Ibra, Messi et al. Bayern Munich v Juventus is a game that oozes class and that you can still get the Germans at 9/2 to win the Champions League is surely because of the strength of the Italians they face tonight.
Both teams are well on their way to winning their domestic titles. Bayern could have won theirs at the weekend but a Dortmund win denied them that pleasure. Still, better to not have the distraction of a title celebration just before a game as massive as the one in Munich tonight.
Speaking of the weekend, Bayern won 9-2 against Hamburg, with the likes of Claudio Pizarro and Arjen Robben in rampant form. Neither is assured of a start tonight. That’s the level of class they have these days. The defeat at home to Arsenal in the last round was a combination of complacency and the absence of Bastian Schweinsteiger. Both of those are non-factors tonight.
Juve are rock solid defensively, with just three goals conceded in their last 10 games. In Andrea Pirlo they have a midfielder on par with Xavi and Iniesta but it is up front that they may struggle. Mirko Vucinic is recovered from flu so may start but he is patchy at best. Alessandro Matri may be even worse while Fabio Quagliarella and Sebastian Giovinco are not goal machines either.
The Old Lady will be tough for Bayern to break down, and how they go about it will be fascinating. Juve will try and hit them on the break and with set-pieces but there is no way the Germans will make the same individual errors Celtic made, errors that ultimately saw them undone.
A tight, hard fought win for the home side tonight sets up the second leg next week perfectly, when we get to do this all over again. Thanks you Champions League, thank you.
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