Champions League with Pep

I think Pep's approach in the CL was wrong when the away goal applied. He seemed to try and make the away leg tight and blast teams away at home, when it was better to either do the opposite or just play our usual game. We should have done better, but I would caveat that by saying another couple of CL successes could possibly have been at the expense of winning the league.

We were in battles right to the wire whilst trying to deal with CL knockout games and that's incredibly hard to do.

We should have beaten Chelsea, we were the best team in Europe then and that was a missed opportunity.

To win our first as part of the treble was quite nice though!

You need luck, I don't think we've ever really had much of it in Europe. Could be Maresca comes in and wins one in his first year despite us not being regarded as the best team in Europe. Chelsea's best side never won the CL yet they won it once with a pretty poor team by their recent standards (at the time) and then against us when they definitely weren't as good.
 
Pep won 2 at Barcelona and he had the best team ever assembled plus the best player ever. I know he wasn't there for that long but you'd think with that team they'd win a ton of them but he didn't.

It's just a really difficult trophy to win but mainly because you have to throw in the luck of the draw and luck over two legs then like Arsenal you can lose on a lottery like penalties anyway. We've played Real Madrid every year for what 5 years? In several of those years they went on to win it so we've almost always played the best team and won or lost.

I mean bloody hell Chelsea won the Champions League against us and they finished 19pts behind us in the league, that's how random it can be.

Domination of the Premier League will always be a bigger achievement because you have to be the best team over 38 games and you could lose any of them. No team ever won 4 titles in a row and no team ever got 100pts until Pep.
 
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2021 was a blunder and should have been our first. We were far and away the best side in Europe that year. But who knows if the treble would have happened if we did it then.

We really should have had a couple more finals too I think. Paris 2022 if we kept our heads in Madrid, and Madrid 2019 if VAR hadn’t fucked us over in the Spurs game (we’d have beaten Ajax in the semi no problem).
 
Just the Chelsea one and it still annoys me to think about it.

The Spurs semi was shit but that’s knockout football, similar with the Madrid collapse. Shit refs, var, mistakes, they all happen to ever team.

But having got to the final, you fucking win. Especially as that City side was so much better than that Chelsea team.
 

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