THE CHAMPIONS LEAGUE continues on Wednesday night. Here Adam Goodwin (@AGJournalism) picks out his favourite fancy from Manchester United's trip to Moscow to face CSKA.
CSKA Moscow v Manchester United | Wednesday 27th September 2017, 19:45 | BT Sport
In Manchester United’s first Champions League group game since 2015, they swept aside Basel at Old Trafford thanks to goals from Marouane Fellaini, Romelu Lukaku and Marcus Rashford.
Just like most of United’s games this season, as soon as they scored the first goal, the rest followed. Basel attempted to shut out the Red Devils but their efforts were to no avail.
Many wondered how United would cope without their £89 million man Paul Pogba, but the much-taunted Fellaini has filled in superbly in centre-midfield. But now Fellaini is also out due to injury, so it’ll be interesting to see if Ander Herrera or Michael Carrick can do a similarly good job.
CSKA Moscow defied the odds by beating Benfica away in gameweek one, despite going 1-0 down. Goalkeeper Igor Akinfeev has infamously not kept a Champions League group stage clean sheet since a 0-0 draw against Arsenal in November 2006, which will undoubtedly excite the United forwards ahead of this clash.
As we saw from both sides in their first group games, they can score goals in this competition. CSKA have scored 22 in their last 16 Champions League at home, this includes goals against Manchester City, Bayern Munich, and Manchester United in 2015.
United have already scored 17 goals in the Premier League this season, and have bagged an average of 1.25 goals in their last 10 Champions League games.
Moscow is just under a six hour flight from Manchester and is never an easy place to go, and if you take into consideration Akinfeev’s terrible Champions League clean sheet record, I can see both teams scoring at the VEB Arena on Wednesday.
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