Champions League, you're having a laugh etc
Unbelievable scenes this evening as both Manchester teams failed miserably to qualify from the group stages of the Champions League - a tournament, lest we forget, whose chief function these days is as a cash cow for the bigger teams, and whose deck is massively stacked in their favour. City's exit was no surprise, the damage having been done by their failure to beat Napoli. You could argue that Mancini's men were unlucky to land themselves such a tough group - obviously as debutants they had to start in pot 3, but they probably would have been happy be paired with anyone from pot 4 bar the Italians, with the possible exception of Dortmund. Cynics will point out that the Azzuri were making their first group stage appearance too, but the vast sums spunked by City in the last couple of years created a unique kind of pressure which the team patently struggled to deal with. Napoli's position is more akin to that of Spurs last season - not expected to qualify, and thus able