A fire broke out at the Etihad Stadium before their do-or-die match with Club Brugge and it looked to a sign of things to come as Manchester City’s Champions League dreams went up in smoke when they fell 1-0 down at half-time.
But Savinho came off the bench armed with a hose and a ladder and doused the flames to give Pep Guardiola’s side a 3-1 victory which averted a disastrous early elimination and sealed their passage to the play-offs. The bad news? They will face Real Madrid or Bayern Munich in the next round.
Most City fans would have written this game off as a certain dead-rubber when the fixtures for the expanded competition were released in September but instead they faced what Pep Guardiola and Josko Gvardiol both described as “a final”. Their task, after a horrendous League Phase campaign in which they had won just two of their seven games, was simple: victory would take them into the play-offs but anything less would mean failing to reach the knockout stage for the first time in 12 years.
They faced a Brugge side who had not lost for 20 games in all competitions and who only needed a draw to progress to the play-offs. The Belgians let City dictate the pace of the game and tried to pick their hosts off on the counter. Josko Gvardiol blocked an early strike from Chemsdine Talbi after a breakaway move but Brugge countered again just before half-time, when Ferran Jutgla surged forward, sent Matheus Nunes back to Rio de Janeiro and teed up Raphael Onyedika to blast first-time past Ederson.
Pep Guardiola, facing his earliest ever elimination from the competition he has won three times, was ruthless at the break and threw on Savinho for the lumbering Ilkay Gundogan. The winger injected some much-needed pace and flair into City and he helped fashion two good chances before Mateo Kovacic bounded through the middle of the pitch unopposed and fired into the bottom corner to equalise in the 53rd minute.
City needed one more goal to make it through and after a coupe of heart-in-mouth moments they found it, Savinho playing in Gvardiol whose cross was turned into the net by the hapless Brugge defender Joel Ordonez. Savinho then fittingly made sure of City’s victory by scoring their third in the 77th minute. Brugge also sneaked through into the play-offs, occupying the 24th spot.
GOAL rates Man City’s players from the Etihad Stadium…