I'm proud of the effort the lads gave tonight and relieved and thankful to Pellegrini for putting his dogmatic 442 to one side for one match thus giving us a puncher's chance of going through. However much effort we put in tonught, the damage was already done from the first leg. If we'd have set up at home the way.we set up at the Nou Camp, with home advantage I reckon we could have at least held Barca if not nicked a win, but this tie was lost from the first game and it was always going to be an up hill battle to get through.
Credit to Barca, they, Bayern and Real are a level above the rest and Barca showed how far ahead the elite of Europe are tonight. Personally I would have started with either Nasri or Yaya (probably Yaya) but not both. I thought today it was obvious we needed players with graft and endeavour to be patrolling the channels and Navas alongside Milner would have been my starting choices out wide.
Pellegrini did what he mostly fails to do by moving Yaya further forward replacing him with Milner in the middle when it was obvious he was flagging and then taking him off altogether when Yaya was all but dead on his feet. We have 3 out and out strikers and IMO 4 No 10's in Yaya, Silva, Nasri and Jovetic and from here on in I would like to think that MP will select a balanced team to see us through to the end of the season and not just pick our best players and hope it all comes good.
It saddens me to think that it possibly took rumours of Pellegrini's job being on the line before he did what was necessary to try and win a big match where we were the underdogs. Whether he stays or goes I hope he's learned a lesson that tactics and decent players who are given a viable bespoke plan by the manager win matches. We'll never know what might have been if Aguero had scored. Hart played possibly the best game I've seen him perform in at one end and we just lacked that killer cutting edge to take advantage at the other.
All in all I'm proud of our efforts tonight albeit I'm disappointed we're out, but having said that, I'm fuckin even more gutted about our clueless performance in the first leg because that was where this ties was ultimately lost for us making tonight's match almost academic. Over to you Manuel.......