Guardiola and Manchester City succumb to their most ludicrous Champions League exit yet

Manchester City handled that game wonderfully but Real Madrid have dibs on the Champions League and Pep Guardiola can’t compete with that.

There was a time when, like Brendan Rodgers and Jose Mourinho’s current deathcycle of tedious wine-centric repartee, it felt as though Pep Guardiola could not navigate a single press conference without making reference to how Manchester City were not ready. The Spaniard, a two-time European champion qualified to make such clinical diagnoses, inherited a side that reached a Champions League semi-final immediately before his appointment. But Manuel Pellegrini’s team had limped to defeat against Real Madrid at the penultimate hurdle in a tie that only emphasised his point.

“We are far away,” Guardiola said in April 2017. “Not in terms of the quality – in terms of how they play situations. It’s about how you live and handle the situation. For that you need experience. Hopefully we got that experience there and it’ll help us.”

No experience could have prepared them for this. There is no training drill for climbing a mountain with endless peaks, no rehearsal for something that can only be ascribed to fate, no practice for killing that which will not die. Manchester City have capitulated and collapsed in an increasingly maddening variety of ways under Guardiola in the Champions League: scoring six in defeat to Monaco; making a mockery of a 25-point Premier League gap over Liverpool; succumbing to Fernando Llorente’s hip; inexplicably using a three-man defence against Lyon; entirely casting aside the idea of a holding midfielder in an actual final. But this might have been the most ludicrously convoluted method yet through which the holy grail has slipped from their hands.

Here’s to Plucky