Real Madrid boss Carlo Ancelotti dismissed Pep Guardiola's claim that Manchester City have a 1% chance of winning their Champions League play-off second leg on Wednesday. (More Sports News)
🀅Ancelotti watched on as a late turnaround at the Etihad Stadium earned Los Blancos a 3-2 victory in the first leg, with Jude Bellingham netting the winner.
𝕴Indeed, it was the 40th time Real have won the first leg of a European knockout stage game away from home, and they have an imperious record in two-legged ties.
▨They’ve progressed from 37 of the previous 39, failing only against Odense Boldklub (1994-95 UEFA Cup) and Ajax (2018-19 Champions League).
ℱMadrid have also lost just one of their six Champions League home games against City (W3 D2), going down 2-1 in the round of 16 in 2019-20.
🌠The Opta supercomputer hands Madrid a 48% win probability to the Citizens' 29.3%, but Ancelotti believes his team only hold a small advantage in the tie.
💞"Honestly, not even (Guardiola) believes what he said, but I'm going to ask him about it before the game anyway," Ancelotti joked in a press conference on Tuesday.
ও"He doesn't think they have a one percent chance of advancing and neither do we think we are 99 percent favourites. We have a small advantage due to what we did at Manchester, and we have to use it in our favour.
🏅"Learning to play with the advantage is a psychological issue, and it is difficult to deal with it. I could come here and say that we have no advantage and will play as if we were 0-0... but it's nonsense and nobody would believe me.
🥂"What you can control is the attitude of the team and ensure we play the same game as a week ago because it went well for us. But you can't forget that you have the advantage."
♏Recently, Madrid executives met with the head of Spain's refereeing body earlier this week, after the club filed a formal complaint over the referee's decisions in their 1-0 LaLiga defeat at Espanyol earlier this month.
🔥Ancelotti was furious after referee Alejandro Muniz Ruiz opted not to send off defender Carlos Romero for a poor challenge on Kylian Mbappe in the contest.
๊Romero would go on to score the game's only goal, with Real sending an open letter to the Spanish football federation at the start of February requesting access to audio and conversations between officials surrounding the incident.
💯Ancelotti, however, said the Champions League had fewer controversial calls, though he still had issues with VAR.
🅠"I do (feel calmer), the statistics speak for themselves. There is less controversy and less intervention by the VAR (in the Champions League), which only intervenes when necessary," Ancelotti said.
𝓀"In the Champions League, only the best referees from each country are assigned, and the quality is very high in this respect.
♈"I have doubts (about VAR) because I think VAR has taken too much responsibility away from the referee. It's a bit of a dangerous system.
🐽"The VAR has been introduced to avoid blatant and obvious mistakes, not for interventions that are football-related. Often the aim is to remove all the naturalness of football for the sake of an image."
