BORUSSIA DORTMUND 1, MANCHESTER CITY 0
Manchester City have exited the Champions League at the group stage for the second time in two years, becoming the first English side to fail to pick up any wins from their six group stage games as they didn’t even qualify for a place in the Europa League.
A poor 1-0 defeat in Dortmund, with the only goal scored by Julian Schieber after 57 minutes,when Jakub Blaszczykowski’s right wing cross evaded Vincent Kompany and Joe Hart, confirmed City’s rock bottom finish.
Goalkeeper Hart was visibly angry at City’s exit.
“Was it the same old story? Yes. I don’t know why. I’d love to answer it. We need to address it though.
“The intensity was there but once they scored it disappeared which is a shame as we have showed we are a side that can come from behind. Of course we have let ourselves down, because we haven’t even got in the Europa League.
“There was a hunger to win tonight and if that meant Europa League than great. But we have got bigger issues than that. We were up against a weakened team and we had to win. We should be fighting to go through to the last 16 on the last day and we have only got ourselves to blame that we are not.”
Roberto Mancini insisted that City would rather have stayed in Europe in the new year, via the Europa League, although he conceded that City were effectively knocked out of Europe after individual errors culminated in losing leads against Real Madrid and Ajax.
“I don’t think we lost our qualifying tonight, we lost before. Tonight we tried but we were missing players. We had chances to score but we didn’t and if you don’t do it is difficult to win.” said City’s manager.
“Getting into the Europa League was our target tonight. We wanted to win but to win we needed to score. Right now, we don’t score a lot of goals when we have chances. We need to resolve this problem if we want to win.
“Last season we did better. This year we had a very difficult group and if you make a mistake in the first two or three games it is very difficult.
“We were 2-1 in Madrid with 4 minutes to go, we were 1-0 in Amsterdam with 2 or 3 chances to score another goal.”
Both sides were lacking full strength, with injuries and suspensions and an eye on weekend fixtures affecting team selections.
Mancini’s side lacked ideas early in the game and when Dortmund stepped up a gear in the second half they didn’t have a response, relying once again on heroics by Joe Hart to keep the scoreline respectable.
Dortmund could have extended their lead with chances from Lewandowski, Hummels, and Leitner going begging but City can have no complaints about the result but they will have a quick chance to make amends when United visit on Sunday.