Sergio Agüero believes Manchester City’s battling display which earned a 2-2 draw at Paris Saint-Germain in the Champions League quarter-final first leg proves the club belongs in elite company.
Kevin De Bruyne opened the scoring on 39 minutes, before goals from Zlatan Ibrahimovic and Adrien Rabiot seemed to have secured victory for Laurent Blanc’s team. But City showed character to equalise through Fernandinho 17 minutes before the end, giving Manuel Pellegrini two away goals that may prove vital.
Agüero said: “City are back where they have to be. PSG are a great team so it was important that we scored and, as luck would have it, we did. But we can’t take anything for granted. Nothing is certain. We have 90 minutes more and we must do our best.”
Agüero pointed to how City never wavered despite being pinned back for large parts of the game. “We tried to play our game and do what we had to do,” said the striker. “We tried to wait a little and to have a counterattack. We scored the first goal and got the 1-0 lead that we wanted.
“I have a good feeling now. This was an important result and we are going to be very excited to play the second game, especially because it will be at home in front of all our fans.”
Agüero is not taking too much notice of the statistic that shows 79.4% of sides who draw 2-2 in an away leg progress in European competition.
“You can’t pay too much attention to statistics,” he said. “We just have to play our best and try to win. They have good players which makes for a complicated defence, but we were also able to score two goals against a defence that is very strong.
“We watched videos before the match, but the key was to know what kind of game we were going to play and then score first. Then it was just bad luck that they were able to equalise. That happens in football. They kept playing well. We tried to wait for the counterattack. Luckily we were able to score the second. It was a fair tie.”
