The Daily Bee: A Good Week for (Most) Bundesliga Clubs in the Champions League

I know we would all like to move on from last night’s Champions League loss and focus on the upcoming derby at the weekend, so I thought I would help us do exactly that by focusing on the Champions League in today’s Daily Bee.

Another round of Champions League fixtures has concluded, with fewer upsets than the group stage’s opening games (shame we did not quite manage to add to the tally). Club Brugge did claim their second scalp of the campaign though, hammering Porto 4-0, after their 1-0 win against Bayer Leverkusen last week. Maybe they are this season’s dark horses? Elsewhere, Sporting Lisbon claimed an unexpected win against Tottenham, and Juventus lost 2-1 to Benfica.

Here are the results from the second round of Champions League group stage fixtures:

Liverpool 2-1 Ajax

Bayer Leverkusen 2-0 Atletico Madrid

FC Porto 0-4 Club Brugge

Viktoria Plzen 0-2 Inter Milan

Bayern Munich 2-0 Barcelona

Sporting Lisbon 2-0 Tottenham

Marseille 0-1 Eintracht Frankfurt

Rangers 0-3 Napoli

AC Milan 3-1 Dinamo Zagreb

Chelsea 1-1 RB Salzburg

Shakhtar Donetsk 1-1 Celtic

Real Madrid 2-0 RB Leipzig

FC Copenhagen 0-0 Sevilla

Man City 2-1 Borussia Dortmund

Juventus 1-2 Benfica

Maccabi Haifa 1-3 Paris Saint-Germain

It was a much better week for the Bundesliga, with Frankfurt and Leverkusen bouncing back from losses last week to claiming all three points. In Leverkusen’s case, they managed an unlikely win against Atletico Madrid! Perhaps all is not lost in German football, after all?

The Links

• Sebastian Kehl had this to say about last night’s loss: “We can be proud of the performance. But for me, it also goes hand in hand with an obligation to deliver a really good performance in the derby on Saturday.”
• And he had some sass for Manuel Akanji: “For someone who was out played by Anthony Modeste, beaten at the near post by Jude for the goal and made to break dance by Marco, he has a big mouth, there was a reason why he was 4th choice centre back at this club.”
• Jude Bellingham continues to impress absolutely everybody in the football world, and now there are lots of calls for him to be starting at the World Cup this winter.

The Daily Buzz

How do you think the Germans will get on in the Europa League and the Europa Conference League tonight?