Gareth Bale surprised with MC Semi-Final Appearance

Gareth Bale is surprised that Manchester City are making an appearance in the Champions League semi-final for the first time on Tuesday night.

The club were taken over by Middle East owners in 2008. Since then, a period of big spending has followed the club with many big names like Sergio Aguero and Yaya Touré coming to the club. Title success has also followed with the arrival of the quality players. City have won the League Cup, league title, and the FA Cup to complete the domestic set of trophies. However, they have underachieved a lot in Europe.

After repeated failures to even reach the last 16 stages, the club only recently managed to get past the early knockout stages. The win over Paris St Germain in the quarter-final a few weeks ago gave them access to Champions League last four for the first time in their history. Gareth Bale did not experience much of Champions League football before moving to Real Madrid for a world record transfer fee of £ 80 million. However, he is now considered as one of the club’s important names. He will be the front-runner for the team, which will be without Cristiano Ronaldo, in the first leg at Etihad stadium.

"You don't get this far on luck and any of the teams would have been difficult. We're excited and are looking forward to it. I'm surprised that they haven't got to this stage before now. They're a top Premier League team and are getting that way in Europe. They've worked very hard, but tomorrow we want to halt their rise. We're confident and we'll be going out to win. In Wolfsburg we had a tough time of things but we've looked at our mistakes and we've got to impose ourselves and try to win the game,” said Bale.