Leipzig v Man City: Champions League last 16, first leg – live

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The teams are out! Leipzig in their home kit of white, red squiggles and fizzy bevvy logo, City in second-choice Hacienda-infused black with red diagonals. A fine atmosphere at the Zentralstadion. “Gotta ask - what’s the story with the pennants nowadays?” begins De Feu, veering dangerously close to airplane peanuts territory. “Do clubs take on a store of them every season? What do they do with them? What’s the point anymore now the internet records everything?” Dealing with your questions seriatim: don’t know; no idea; don’t know; they’re just nice to swap and keep, I guess, though I’m also aware that younger generations aren’t into actual things any more, so there’s probably no point asking this confused and scared old man. We’ll be off in a minute!

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

Pennant watch. Here’s what İlkay Gündoğan will be handing over to his opposite number Willi Orbán tonight. Some high-end embossing on display there, as plush as they come. You could probably soak up a whole spilt can of taurine-based Cardiac Compromiser using that.

This scores a full 10 out of 10 on our classygear-o-meter. Photograph: Boris Streubel/UEFA/Getty Images

How the teams got here. Leipzig only secured their place in the knockouts with a 4-0 win at Shakhtar Donetsk on matchday six. Not a bad way to bounce back after Shakhtar beat them 4-1 in Germany on the opening night.

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

Fancy reliving what happened when the teams met in this competition last season? Course you do. Here’s how the nine-goal thriller at the Etihad unfolded …

… and this is the way the reverse fixture went.

RB Leipzig’s star forward Christopher Nkunku is only recently back from injury so starts on the bench. Timo Werner, who won this competition with Chelsea in 2021, leads the line.

Manchester City make three changes to the starting XI selected for the 1-1 draw at Nottingham Forest. Nathan Ake, Manuel Akanji and Riyad Mahrez replace Phil Foden, who drops to the bench, and Aymeric Laporte and Kevin de Bruyne, both ill and tucked up at home.

The teams

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

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

Referee: Serdar Gözübüyük (Netherlands).

Preamble

Clubs from the Premier League are currently zero for three in this season’s Champions League last 16 first legs. AC Milan, Borussia Dortmund and Real Madrid have already beaten Tottenham Hotspur, Chelsea and Liverpool respectively; now Manchester City see if they can do a little better as they travel to Germany tonight.

City are favourites to make it through to the quarter-finals. They strolled through the group stage, while their round-of-16 opponents Leipzig only clinched knockout qualification on matchday six. But consistency has been elusive of late – easy wins over Aston Villa and Arsenal have been bookended by defeat at Tottenham and a plethora of chances missed in a draw with Nottingham Forest – and City lost 2-1 here in Leipzig in the groups last season.

On the other hand, Leipzig aren’t in the richest vein of form themselves. having taken just four points from the last nine available in the Bundesliga. And they’ll need to hang on in there tonight, because when they travelled to Manchester for the reverse group fixture last season, they were skelped 6-3. Much may depend on the performances of in-demand Croatia defender Josko Gvardiol and former Chelsea striker Timo Werner, and whether they’ll be able to field Christopher Nkunku, who scored a hat-trick at the Etihad in that aforementioned nine-goal thriller.

Kick off is at 8pm GMT, 9pm local. It’s on!