Manchester City scrapped and fought their way into the history books – a victory in adversity – to win their first Uefa Champions League, becoming only the second English club to claim “the treble” after this season’s FA Cup and Premier league triumphs.
On a nervous night in Istanbul, and despite losing their Belgian playmaker Kevin De Bruyne in the 35th minute to injury, City snatched the game away from Internazionale in the 68th minute with one of their few shots on target to take the final piece of silverware.
Sheikh Mansour, attending only his second City match since taking over the club in 2008, may have to expand the trophy cabinet in his office at the Ministry of Presidential Affairs in Abu Dhabi.
He is said to have replica of every piece of silverware won during his tenure in a glass box. The Champions League trophy now joins the seven Premier League titles, three FA Cups and six Football League Cups won during his tenure.
It may be only the second piece of European silverware won by City in the club’s 140 year history, after their 1970 European cup winners cup, but this win could well mark the turning of a new page in English football.
City become the 23rd club to have won the Uefa Champions League or its precursor, the European Cup, and will now be hoping to be a dominant force for years to come.
They can have every expectation that this will be the case, with record annual revenues for an English club now secured and plans already submitted to expand their Etihad Stadium to more than 60,000 capacity.
The win was perhaps all the more significant as it was secured with heart and graft rather than the usual seemingly effortless grace that has been the hallmark of Pep Guardiola’s team this season.
“We are the boys in blue and we are coming for you,” the City fans roared at the finale of what was an unexpectedly tense and tight game in front of 72,000 fans in the Atatürk Olympic Stadium.
It was Guardiola’s third Champions League victory as a manager. He won twice with Barcelona and had spoken of his “obsession” with taking it for City. The Spanish manager, who many will now hail as the greatest in the sport’s history, broke down in tears as the match came to its conclusion.
“It was written in the stars,” Guardiola said in a post match interview. “It belongs to us. We weren’t at our best level. After the World Cup the team made a step forward and we were there. It wasn’t our best performance.”
Asked how he was feeling, he added: “Tired, calm, satisfied of course … this fucking trophy, it’s so difficult to win it. It’s a question of being patient and you have to be lucky.”
Such a treble slam dunk on the domestic and European stage has only been achieved once before, by local rivals Manchester United, in the 1998-99 season when City were at their lowest ebb, fighting to get out of the third tier of the domestic leagues.
City had, nevertheless, been by far and away the bookmakers’ favourites, with even Inter fans on the way into the stadium conceding that they were the underdogs. Yet the script of an effortless walkover was soon ripped up
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