Roberto Mancini claimed he was not embarrassed after the defeat by Borussia Dortmund on Tuesday saw Manchester City crash out of the Champions League.
Roberto Mancini's Manchester City did not stand still in this Champions League campaign, they regressed. Three points, no wins, muted performances and an alarming lack of know-how marked a path to bottom place in Group D. Even Europa League football – the "prize" for finishing third of four teams – was beyond reach.
This goes down as the most dire English performance in the group stages of the continent's elite competition. The nadir of Blackburn Rovers in 1995-96, which featured the David Batty-Graeme Le Saux punch-up at Spartak Moscow, showed a final tally of four points and can now be replaced by City's humiliation.
A phase that threw up the glory-soaked night of cash-strapped Celtic beating Barcelona 2-1 thanks to a late winner from an 18-year-old debutant, Tony Watt, had the £1bn Sheikh Mansour project taught a lesson at every stop it limped into. City scored only seven times (two fewer than last year), lost 3-1 to a callow Ajax in Amsterdam, and ended a painful, six-game long capitulation by surrendering on Tuesday evening to a largely second-string Borussia Dortmund.
The injured David Silva and Gaël Clichy apart, plus the suspended Yaya Touré, the XI sent out by Mancini, who cannot stop rotating strikers, was his strongest. For Dortmund, Jürgen Klopp fielded only five of the team that taught City a lesson in the earlier, reverse match between the two, as the captain, Sebastian Kehl, Sven Bender and Mario Götze were injured and the star Polish trio of Lukasz Piszczek, Jakub Blaszczykowski and Robert Lewandowski were named only as substitutes.
Dietmar Hamann, the former City midfielder who won the 2005 Champions League with Liverpool, summed up the disbelief at the performance that sealed City's exit from European football this season. "The gulf looked very big," he told Sky Sports. "Borussia rested some of their top players. The players who came in for City all cost a lot of money. The Borussia players didn't. I saw one team that had the will to win and one that didn't. If I didn't know beforehand what their position in the group was I would have thought that Borussia had something to play for and City didn't."
As damning was the verdict of Ruud Gullit, a double European Cup winner with Milan: "The manager takes the responsibility when you win and when you lose. If the intention was to get out of playing in the Europa League then they did a great job. If their intention was to win to get in to the Europa League then they made a fool of themselves. It was dreadful. There was no team at all. I didn't see anybody getting mad or angry or even looking like they wanted to do it. It was such a bad performance. Even though they didn't want to play in the Europa League, at least they could have made an effort. At least do something.
"They bought a lot of players for their name. I don't think they bought players for other reasons. I don't see the reason they bought Maicon. Maybe someone can tell me that. They had some good players and they sold them."
In last season's Champions League bow City gathered 10 points, scored nine times and returned two victories to finish behind Napoli and Bayern Munich. Then, Mancini's mantra was that 10 points is usually enough to progress, and that lessons would be learned, the experience drawn on.
Yet the alarm again sounded as early as the end of this term's opener at Real Madrid. 87th and 90th minute goals from Karim Benzema and Cristiano Ronaldo turned a 2-1 win into a morale sapping loss for City. "Mancini said after one defeat that he knew what the problem was and he would fix it," Gullit added. "That's what he said. I have not seen that he has fixed it. I just see them playing worse and worse."
From Madrid, Mancini's men sleepwalked through the stage. Two weeks later, Mario Balotelli's late penalty salvaged a point at the Etihad after Dortmund's slick passing and clever technique took City apart. Then came the debacle at Ajax despite Samir Nasri giving City a 22nd-minute lead, when lax defending and foggy-minded attacking allowed Frank de Boer's band to win at a canter, 3-1. In the return, the Dutch champions were 2-0 up after only 17 minutes before goals from Touré and Sergio Agüero salvaged a point. That made it only one managed from the six on offer against the group's weakest team.
Ultimately, this return cost Mancini's gang the chance to retain hope of progressing into the final two matches as the Italian faced the indignity of having José Mourinho bring his side to the Etihad in late November with City virtually out and watch the man who may replace him one day oversee the 1-1 draw that finally killed any mathematical chance. Of this, Mourinho laughed and said: "If it was Real Madrid the press wouldn't let me return to Madrid."
At the Westfalenstadion on Tuesday Mancini claimed he was not embarrassed by City's failure. He added: "Dortmund went out in the group stage last season, and were fourth. But this season they can win it in my opinion. When you start and make mistakes, like we did in the first two or three games, you cannot recover."
Football's ruthlessness means Mancini will be lucky to get the chance to make it third time lucky next season.
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