Micah Richards remembers the fear of it all, the panic of the big nights when he didn’t know what to expect other than 90 minutes of torment.
Bayern Munich were always the ones. Whether it was Franck Ribery or Arjen Robben, it felt like a pair of Red Arrows were hurtling down the runway towards him; Richards could handle pace but it was the fact both could deceive like master pickpockets and had more tricks than a magician.
‘It was a level above,’ Richards tells Daily Mail Sport. ‘You knew what was going on in the Premier League, from week to week, but then we would step into the Champions League and there would be games when you’d be thinking: “what is going on here?