Manchester City beat Barcelona for the first time in the Champions League!
Stuffed them 3-1.
That was the biggest football news of the week.
For once, Messi, Neymar & Suarez didn’t have it all their own way.
The first game in the Nou Camp was close for an hour before Barca beat 10 men by 4-0. But this match wasn’t close, even though maestro Messi got the first goal.
City played beautiful flowing football with lots of penetration and Barcelona got battered, which doesn’t happen very often.
Let’s hear it for for Raheem Sterling, who’s improving every month, for Gundogan, who equalised Messi’s early goal to make it 1-1 at half time.
City had never been ahead in a serious game against Barcelona. But when Kevin De Bruyne whipped a flat free-kick over the wall, Ter Stegen could only get a faint touch as the ball went in for 2-1.
Then Gundogan made it 3-1 after 74 minutes.
Ilkay Gundogan, 26, was born in Gelsenkirchen, where Mesut Ozil was born two years previously.
When he scored two goals at West Brom last Saturday and another two against Barcelona on Tuesday night, he was gliding into the kind of positions Frank Lampard used to find.
Like Lampard, Gundogan reads the game, knows exactly when to go, and makes the difficult art of finishing look easy. Off the ball, he is fantastic.
City play Middlesbrough today and their keeper is big Victor Valdes, a guy I watched improve season after season for Barca from 2003 onwards, as Barcelona won everything that a football team can possibly win. Valdes gradually became much better at claiming high balls.
Yes, I know that Lampard was a goal-machine who scored 211 in all competitions for Chelsea.
And Gundogan won’t get anywhere near that total. But the German does a lot of the same things that Frank used to do and he’s alongside a magnificent playmaker, Kevin De Bruyne, who improves everybody’s stats.
Middlesbrough have a well-organised defence. If they pick up Gundogan’s third-man runs today, Boro won’t get hammered. But that’s easier said than done.