A reunion with Manchester City brings bad memories for the RB Leipzig defender Maxime Esteve. He scored two own goals at the Etihad Stadium last year. Not that he has advertised this to his new teammates.
"Maybe they don't even know," he jokes. It is an amusing statistic that this time last year, indeed until the final days of November, a dozen games into the Premier League season, Esteve had found the net for City more times than everyone bar Erling Haaland. You don't have to say!" The 24-year-old French centre-back left Burnley for Leipzig in the summer and the truth is that he is aching to face City again.
He has been on the bench for their opening two Champions League games and is desperate to make his debut in the competition. "Five years ago, when I was a young kid at Montpellier, my former club, I would have killed to be in this situation now, even if sometimes you do not have the playing time that you want," he explains. "It was always a dream to play for a Champions League club." Unlucky own goals aside - "and I remember the second was really, really unlucky", Esteve insists - he was brilliant for Burnley.
Even in that game against City, his manager Scott Parker made a point of highlighting all his good work in the analysis afterwards. "I had a meeting on the Monday with him. He told me, 'Max, this is nothing.
This is really, really nothing.' Instead, he showed me the good things that I did in the game. Just for the confidence, it was good. It was a bad memory for me at the time but this is football." Will there be more bad memories after coming up against Haaland again?
Esteve acknowledges that Harry Kane has just been honoured with the Ballon d'Or but in his view nobody is better than Haaland. "The best striker I have played against," he says. "I played just two games against him, but you can see that he is, I think, maybe the best striker in the world.
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