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Leicester stun Club Brugge 3-0

Leicester City scored one of their goals

Leicester City scored one of their goals

Leicester City celebrated their first ever Champions League match by romping to victory away to Belgium’s Club Brugge.

Marc Albrighton scored with the Foxes’ first shot after a defensive error from right-back Luis Hernandez’s long throw.

Riyad Mahrez curled in a masterful free-kick for 2-0 before half-time.

Mahrez smashed in a penalty after Jamie Vardy was brought down by the keeper before Brugge’s Jose Izquierdo hit the post, adding to his bad miss at 0-0.

There will be more difficult games than this, but the Premier League champions displayed a maturity and composure that suggests potential to achieve plenty more success at the elite level of European club football.

This was only the ninth European match in Leicester’s history, and their first win since a victory over Glenavon of Northern Ireland in the preliminary round of the 1961-62 Cup Winners’ Cup – when 1966 World Cup winner Gordon Banks was in goal.

Danny Drinkwater went close with a dipping volley struck on the turn with the ball almost at ground level from outside the box, while Robert Huth might have added a fourth from another of Hernandez’s several long throws.

Debutant and club record signing Islam Slimani should have made more of a terrible Benoit Poulain back pass, and was booked for shoving Bjorn Engels in the back, with the Belgian defender forced off with what looked like a dislocated shoulder.

In the night’s other match in Group G, Portuguese club FC Porto drew 1-1 at home to FC Copenhagen of Denmark.

Leicester fans only recieved an allocation of 1,400 tickets for their team’s first ever Champions League match

“It’s impossible to win the Champions League,” Leicester manager Claudio Ranieri said on Tuesday. “There are so many big teams. To win it we have to write another fairytale.”

Eight years ago this September, Leicester supporters might have been looking forward to a decent run in the Johnstone’s Paint Trophy after beating Hartlepool in the first round (they eventually lost to Rotherham in the Northern Section quarter-finals).

Now they are in with a very good chance of making the Champions League knockout stages. But even if the Foxes don’t see more than another five European nights, the feat they have achieved in making it this far – and as champions of England – remains remarkable.

The scores of fans revelling under the historic gabled roofs of Brugge’s sun-drenched squares may not have been able to explain how this moment had arrived, but there was plenty of infectious optimism. That same feeling was nurtured by Ranieri as he willed them to “keep dreaming” after last season’s shock Premier League title win.

The away allocation was only 1,400 and although many others travelled despite not having tickets, they had been told they would be refused entry if they tried to buy tickets for the home section.

This was Brugge’s first game in the Champions League proper for 11 years but it was not a sell-out. Before the game the expectation was 9,000 of the 29,000 seats at the Jan Breydel Stadium would be empty. The Foxes will not mind, with away days in Porto and Copenhagen to come.

-BBC

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