Our 7-0 win over RB Leipzig on Tuesday night was our joint-biggest UEFA Champions League victory of all-time, matching the March 2019 defeat of Schalke.
It sealed our sixth successive quarter-final in Europe’s elite club competition. We have reached the last eight in all but one of Pep Guardiola’s seasons in charge at the Etihad Stadium.
When is the quarter-final draw?
However, the headlines last night were focused on one man. Erling Haaland become only the third player to score five goals in a single Champions League match after Lionel Messi and Luiz Adriano.
His haul took him to 39 for the season across all competitions, making this the most prolific campaign by any City player in the Club’s history. The Norwegian has surpassed Tommy Johnson’s record of 38 achieved in 1928/29.
Here we’ll take a look at how the match was won and lost on the night…
One touch wonder
There’s only one place to start. Erling Haaland.
All five of his goals all came as one-touch finishes.
His first came from the penalty spot before four rebounds – firstly from Kevin De Bruyne’s strike against the bar, secondly by closing down an attempted clearance before the third and fourth rebounds were both after saves to deny Manuel Akanji.
We know just how efficient he is in front of goal but this performance was on another level.
His xG in the match was 2.83 and all eight of his shots were on target, with one of the three that didn’t go in coming a second before his fourth goal.
In total, he has 30 touches in his 63 minutes on the pitch and linked up for 16 passes.
Guardiola will be most pleased to have seen the Norwegian acting as the focal point, featuring in the moves for his second and Ilkay Gundogan’s strike.
Defensively sound
After conceding too many goals for Guardiola’s liking in the early weeks of 2023, this was our fourth clean sheet in a row.
The manager spoke after the game about how difficult it is to keep a clean sheet in the Champions League but hastened to add that his back four was not overly defensive.
Akanji (87), Ruben Dias (77) and Nathan Ake (72) completed more passes than anyone else on the pitch.
With Ake on the left, John Stones on the right and Akanji and Dias between them, City’s back line currently has four men very adept in the air and comfortable in a foot race against most strikers.
Leipzig, who troubled us so much in the second half in Germany last month, were reduced to just one shot on target and four efforts in total.
They finished the game with an xG of just 0.56, zero corners and no big chances according to FotMob’s model.
In fact, they only completed 37 passes in our half. Across the pitch we won 59% of all duels including a whopping 76% in the air.
Mixing it up
City, of course, completed an incredible number of passes again. It was 589 last night compared to Leipzig’s 262.
However, with our aerial dominance we were more than happy to send the ball from back to front quickly. We completed 38 accurate long balls and attempted 28 crosses from wide positions.
All of this allowed us to manoeuvre Leipzig around the pitch at our will and particularly bore fruit with Gundogan’s goal in the first few minutes of the second half.
City had enjoyed almost entirely unbroken possession from the start of the half.
This time they went back to Ederson and then out right to Bernardo Silva. He started a chain reaction that eventually had the ball high on the left flank where Jack Grealish fed it inside to Gundogan.
It’s a goal that can only be scored by a team in total control.
Champions League stats so far this season
Erling Haaland’s 10 goals in the competition so far makes him the first City player to reach double figures in one campaign. It also takes him two ahead of Mo Salah, who is currently his nearest challenger for the Golden Boot.
Our 22 goals as a team makes us the joint-second highest scorers with Napoli. We are both one behind Benfica and one ahead of Bayern Munich.
Our 143 shots is more than anyone else in the competition, as is the number of passes we have completed – 5273.
Kevin De Bruyne’s four assists puts him joint-second in the competition. Joao Cancelo has five with Lionel Messi, Diogo Jota, Khvicha Kvaratskhelia and Leon Goretzka also on four.
Ruben Dias’ 621 passes is the second-most in the competition with Rodrigo in third on 570. They both trail PSG’s Marco Verratti who will play no further part in the tournament this season.
Ederson now has four clean sheets from six matches and has conceded just twice so far.
