Are you watching, Real Madrid?
Hopefully not from a Manchester City perspective because terrestrial television on Saturday lunchtime showed the Premier League champions struggle badly against a team from the third division. A 2-1 comeback win puts them in the hat for the next round, but nobody will fear playing them - least of all the kings of the Champions League.
City fans have seen it all yet these are chastening times for Pep Guardiola and his serial winners, whose descent from the heights they hit has been rough and shows no sign of stopping. Nobody had Leyton Orient fans singing that Guardiola would be sacked on their Blues bingo card at the start of the season, and certainly not in the context of them being far from the first fanbase to air it.
Welcome to 2024/25 City though, where one step forward is usually accompanied by at least two back. They eventually got the job done, but the pattern of setbacks continued.
Abdukodir Khusanov endured a start to forget against Chelsea a few weeks ago and here it was arguably even worse for Nico Gonzalez, the £50m midfielder signed on deadline day to take over Rodri's role for the rest of the season. Brushed off the ball too easily in the 16th minute as Jamie Donley brilliantly pulled off an audacious lob over Stefan Ortega that hit the bar and bounced into the net off the goalkeeper, the former Porto man didn't even have the chance to redeem himself as he limped off shortly afterwards with injury.
It wasn't much better for Vitor Reis, with the Brazilian targeted during a difficult 45 minutes before he was replaced by Khusanov. With Erling Haaland given the day off, £59m arrival Omar Marmoush must have wondered how he had gone from banging in goals in the Bundesliga every
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