Manchester City will need ‘one or two days’ to recover, says Pep Guardiola

Manchester City will need a couple of days to come to terms with the fate that has just befallen them but they will rise again, Pep Guardiola insisted after Real Madrid stunned the Premier League champions to reach the Champions League final.

Guardiola admitted it was “tough” after his players had collapsed to the turf in tears having somehow missed out on a showdown against Liverpool as Real Madrid’s impossible, barely believable journey continued, Carlo Ancelotti admitting: “Something strange has happened.”

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Now City must react to keep their league title challenge going, starting at Newcastle on Sunday.

“We need one or two days but we will rise, we will come up,” Guardiola said, in a slow almost hushed tone, his look saying as much as his words could. “We will have do so, with our people. We did everything we could. We were really, really close but in the end we could not do it.”

Asked if this was his hardest European night as a coach, Guardiola replied: “I have had bad defeats in the Champions League before. [Such as] Barcelona against Chelsea when we played two exceptional games and couldn’t make the final. But, yeah, it’s tough. We can’t deny it.

“We were so close to reaching a Champions League final. We didn’t play that good in the first half but we were much better in the second half, we controlled the game and we found the goal. Unfortunately, we could not finish [it] when we were close.”

There were less than three minutes remaining when Ferland Mendy performed a miracle, clearing the ball off his line and somehow keeping this competition’s great survivors alive again, yet even then no one imagined the even greater miracle that