I'm absolutely gutted by this defeat, more so than by any other for a long time. I posted a couple of weeks ago that my 82-year-old dad has cancer. It hasn't yet spread to his brain, as they previously thought it might have, so he has more time left than we suspected a short while back. Still, this is probably the last big game he'll see after more than 75 years following City quite avidly and a win would have cheered him up for a short while at a time when not much else will.
I know it's a mistake to invest football occasions with this kind of personal significance but it's hard not to sometimes. I live 1,500 miles away from him and haven't seen him for 18 months owing to the pandemic and quarantine rules that make it impracticable to do so at the moment, too. It's thus extremely tempting to latch onto such an event, hoping it will carry with it a modicum of fleeting joy. It didn't. Anyway, we'll both get over it, given the other disappointments that we and our fellow committed Blues have seen down the years.
More generally, I've never been able to get on board with this indifference a lot of our fans profess towards this competition. The European Cup was seen as the pinnacle when I was a kid in the seventies and it will thrill me when we do eventually win it to see us cavorting round some top European stadium with the iconic trophy. I thought we had a great chance last night so was devastated it didn't come to pass.
That was compounded by the fact that a failure to win this competition is one of the few sticks that our detractors - who are numerous and vituperative - can still truthfully beat us with. Winning it will deliver a comprehensive and immensely satisfying 'fuck you' to those detractors. I was looking forward to that this weekend as well.
Now, Pep is the best manager we've ever had or probably ever will have. I love him probably more than is healthy for a 51-year-old bloke with regard to someone I've never met. But, like everyone else, I think he got it wrong last night, which contributed significantly to the defeat, and that has frustrated me a great deal.
So I'm licking my wounds this morning, though of course I'll get over it. Good luck to those who can brush it off more easily than I can, but I'm really unable to identify with that sentiment. We'll bounce back, though. It's an achievement deferred, not denied altogether.
It would mean a lot on a personal level if it happened next year in my adopted home city of St Petersburg. But after last night, I'm not quite ready to once again invest my own hopes in something like that.
