Real Madrid hope Benzema continues uncanny knack against English sides against Man City

Just the four goals so far in his five games in the knockout stage of this Uefa Champions League. By recent standards, that counts as a dry spell for Karim Benzema.

This time a year ago, he was on 10 from five in the business end of club football’s most elite competition and he was football’s match-winner supreme.

Rewind 12 months and Benzema’s role as orchestrator-in-chief for a series of breathtaking Real Madrid comebacks was commandeering the votes that would have him crowned as winner of the Ballon d’Or.

He was the captain who lifted the European Cup last May, and in a sport where the English Premier League holds so many aces – including, in Manchester City’s Erling Haaland, the game’s finest young centre-forward – Benzema, the complete No 9, was again and again proving English football’s greatest nemesis.

At issue on Wednesday, as perhaps the strongest English club side of recent memory, a Manchester City with momentum, close in on a possible Treble, is whether Benzema can sustain that habit.

As he shakes hands with his opposite number ahead of kick-off at the fortress that is City’s Etihad Stadium, it is to their captain Madrid look first to swing the balance of a Champions League semi-final poised at 1-1.

But he is in his 36th year now. He had a relatively quiet night in the first leg in Madrid, second fiddle to a dashing Vinicius Junior. Injuries have disrupted his season, although to describe him as out of form would be to exaggerate. Benzema scored three hat-tricks in Spanish domestic football in April alone and will come into Wednesday having been rested at the weekend.

City would be inclined to regard a low-key Benzema as simply ominous when they recall how effectively he seizes his moments. He did that in