“The gap between the first and the second halves is there [to see]. You ask me why the gap is there? It’s the same question I am asking myself. But I tried to get them thinking about it, trying to get them to go and attack and score goals. We did it in the second half.
“We have to have more experience of this, realising it doesn’t matter if we win or lose, but we have to be what we are – respect our style, our strengths. That is what we were able to do in the second half but, in the first, we were not able. Our strength is to be aggressive without the ball. The first half we were a little bit slow in everything, which is why we have conceded a lot of goals in Europe.
“I came here to win the Champions League? Ah. I tried. I tried. And I will try again. Playing like we have done this season, like in the second half, would have been enough.”
Guardiola refused to blame City’s brittle defence for the defeat, despite Tiemoue Bakayoko exploiting their weaknesses at set-pieces to claim the decisive goal, and pointed the finger at the attack for underperforming, with Kevin De Bruyne particularly poor and Sergio Aguero missing two excellent chances in the second half.
“It’s not about the defence, today was not about that… why was the second half a problem with the defence?” Guardiola asked. “The problem was the first half when we were not there. Our strikers have to be aggressive and pick the ball up, but we didn’t [do that] at this crucial time. That’s why we are out. We have to play more than 45 minutes. It’s not about the defence and the goalkeeper.
“The gap between our first and second-half performances was too big. Hopefully we are going to learn.”
Stones said City were weak at both ends of the pitch. “It was very sloppy, not up to our standard in the first half,” the defender said. “We wanted to correct that but we weren’t clinical enough in both boxes. We didn’t score enough and weren’t defensively solid enough.
“The gaffer was saying before that the more and more he plays the Champions League it is about the set-pieces. Real Madrid scored from two last week and went through. We weren’t solid enough.”
Credit:The Telegraph
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