City prove themselves in face of adversity @markbooth_mcfc 2014-12-11 07:36:00 What a night! City saved their best UEFA Champions League showing to date for when it really mattered in Rome last night. Written off after defeat to CSKA Moscow on Match Day Four, the English champions produced a stirring performance against AS Roma to qualify for the knockout stages with a 2-0 win at the Stadio Olimpico. Mark Ogden of the Telegraph goes as far as saying that City can now win the competition, given the adversity the team overcame to qualify for the last 16. Ogdens match report reads: For the second successive season, City have negotiated the Champions League group stages to mix it with Europes elite in the knockout stages, and despite their early faltering steps in Group E, the skin of their teeth remains intact with a three-point margin over the also-rans of Roma and CSKA Moscow. Having fought back from the dead to defeat Bayern Munich 3-2 at the Etihad Stadium last month, City secured the most significant European away victory in their history thanks to Samir Nasris crowd-silencing strike and Pablo Zabaletas late goal in the Stadio Olimpico. And City pulled it off with their big four - Yaya Touré, Vincent Kompany, David Silva and Sergio Agüero - all missing from the starting line-up against last seasons Serie A runners-up. If City can beat Bayern and win in Rome, perhaps they can justify Pellegrinis recent claim that they could go all the way to the final in Berlin next June. Belief, wishful thinking or false hope, it does not really matter because City have drunk in the last-chance saloon and walked through the door, while the likes of Liverpool and Roma have been left slumped under the tables, dreaming of what might have been. One of the (many) heroes of the Stadio Olimpico, Joe Hart, told Sky Sports that it was a match which showed just how much character and resolve the team has. We are a strong unit and we believed in it, Hart declared. We had a bit of a slow start but you dont win the Premier League easily. Weve got resolve, weve got character and weve got great players. Add that all together and you have a chance. It was a great performance and were moving in the right direction. Weve won five or six games on the spin now and weve really stepped it up. Goalscorer and maker of Citys second goal, Nasri said that a patient approach won the day. It was important for me to score as after my surgery it took a little bit of time to come back to that level and now I am, he said. We are a team and we did it today. The manager told us to take our time. We won our game against Bayern Munich in the last minute as well and we knew that we had to be patient. For me my strike was important but at 1-0 the save that Joe made on the corner was amazing. AS Roma boss Rudi Garcia was philosophical in defeat, calling it an evenly match game which could have gone either way. He told the official Roma website: It was an even contest. Perhaps we couldve done more in the first quarter of an hour to win the match. Its a shame because we were playing our game and had a great chance through Cholevas. Their goal was a psychological blow - it killed us. Theyve got some great players wholl punish you. Giving Nasri time and space to shoot like that was fatal. We couldve done better today. We couldve qualified for the next round. The result shows the distance between us and the giants of European football. Thats all for today - remember, the draw for the last 16 of the Champions League is coming up on Monday. You didnt think that we would be looking forward to that a month ago now, did you?
Posted on: Thu, 11 Dec 2014 11:32:48 +0000
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