Leipzig v Manchester City: Champions League round of 16 first leg – live

Pep Guardiola speaks to TNT Sport BT Sport. “These 11 will try to play well and get a good result for the second leg… it’s a great stadium… we always play a back four but different players… we chose to play in that line-up, nothing special … if we let them run it will be a fast game … I’ve spent some time in Germany and if you lose balls in certain positions and you’re not well prepared for their transitions, they’re unstoppable.”

pennant clock. İlkay Gündoğan will hand that over to his counterpart Willi Orbán tonight. Some high-end embossings are on display there, as plush as they come. You could probably soak up a whole spilled can of taurine-based Cardiac Compromiser with that.

How the teams got here. Only on the sixth day of the game did Leipzig secure a place in the round of 16 with a 4-0 win at Shakhtar Donetsk. Not a bad way to bounce back after Shakhtar beat them 4-1 on opening night in Germany.

City, meanwhile, made a tough group look easy. Erling Haaland’s late winning goal against Borussia Dortmund just had to be.

Would you like to relive what happened when the teams met in this competition last season? Of course you do. Here’s how the nine-goal thriller unfolded at the Etihad…

… and so did the reverse fixture.

RB Leipzig’s star striker Christopher Nkunku has only recently returned from injury and will therefore start on the bench. At the top is Timo Werner, who won this competition with Chelsea in 2021.

Manchester City make three changes to the starting XI chosen for the 1-1 draw at Nottingham Forest. Nathan Ake, Manuel Akanji and Riyad Mahrez replace Phil Foden, who falls on the bench, as well as Aymeric Laporte and Kevin de Bruyne, who are both sick and at home.

The teams

RB Leipzig: Blaswich, Klostermann, Orban, Gvardiol, Halstenberg, Laimer, Schlager, Werner, Szoboszlai, Forsberg, Silva.
Substitutes: Nyland, Nickisch, Simakan, Haidara, Poulsen, Nkunku, Raum, Henrichs, Kampl.

Manchester City: Ederson, Walker, Akanji, Dias, Ake, Rodrigo, Gundogan, Silva, Mahrez, Grealish, Haaland.
Substitutes: Ortega Moreno, Carson, Phillips, Alvarez, Gomez, Perrone, Foden, Charles, Palmer, Lewis, Robertson.

Referee: Serdar Gozubuyuk (Netherlands).

TEAM NEWS 🚨

XI | Ederson, Walker, Akanji, Dias, Ake, Rodrigo, Gundogan (C), Bernardo, Mahrez, Grealish, Haaland

SUBS | Ortega Moreno, Carson, Phillips, Alvarez, Gomez, Perrone, Foden, Charles, Palmer, Lewis, Robertson#ManCity pic.twitter.com/8dPv7mxJ4G

– Manchester City (@ManCity) February 22, 2023

Updated at 19:06 GMT

preamble

Premier League clubs are currently 0-3 in this season’s Champions League round of 16 first legs. AC Milan, Borussia Dortmund and Real Madrid have already beaten Tottenham Hotspur, Chelsea and Liverpool; Now Manchester City are seeing if they can do a little better when they travel to Germany tonight.

City are the favorites to reach the quarterfinals. They sauntered through the group stage while their round of 16 opponents Leipzig only secured knockout qualification on Matchday 6. But consistency has been elusive lately – easy victories over Aston Villa and Arsenal have been recorded through a defeat at Tottenham and a plethora of missed chances in a draw against Nottingham Forest – and City lost by 1 here at Leipzig last season: 2 in the groups.

On the other hand, Leipzig itself is not in the best shape. with just four points from the last nine available in the Bundesliga. And they’ll have to hold on tonight because when they traveled to Manchester for the group’s second leg last season they were defeated 6-3. Much may depend on the performances of in-demand Croatian defender Josko Gvardiol and ex-Chelsea striker Timo Werner and whether they can field Christopher Nkunku, who scored a hat-trick at the Etihad in the aforementioned nine-goal thriller.

Kick-off is at 20:00 GMT, 21:00 local time. It’s on!