It was supposed to be a breeze, it has been anything but

City can have no excuses for not qualifying irrelevant of the difficult nature of the group, because of the money they have spent. But we can see in how the two teams approached this week’s game some clues that explain the end result. Whilst Napoli’s league form has tailed off and the goals dried up, they were fully focused, as were their fans, on playing City and getting the necessary victory. Mancini and City find themselves five points clear at the top of the Premier League, and perhaps their focus has slightly shifted in that direction. Either way, Mancini probably thought he could get away with changes and still qualify, but there is nowhere to hide in the Champions League, as he discovered at Inter Milan, and the competition may prove to be his Achilles heel – it’s rather early to be drawing such conclusions though. Maybe Mancini, stung last season by accusations of negativity, was too gung-ho in Europe. But if City don’t qualify, they’ll be back next season, probably stronger and better equipped. The club might have no experience of the competition, but plenty of the players do – they can have no excuses next time round.

Manchester United last finished as group runners-up in 2004-05 and were duly beaten home and away by Milan to crash out in the knockout stages. In 2005-06, they finished bottom of their group. Apart from that, their progress to at least the quarter-finals has been consistent. And the statistics show their start to the Premier League season to be one of their best.

And yet the murmurings continue about the quality of the side, or at least of their performances. United are used to this – such noises accompanied them to a league title throughout last season and all the way to a Champions League final.

Their group was considered one of the easier ones, especially for a club with United’s experience. Their struggles have been harder to explain. But Alex Ferguson has to rebuild another team. Much of the old guard has gone, or is going. A new batch of young players have arrived, but despite the ridiculous levels of media hype, are not fit to lace the shoes of some that have gone before them just yet. Their time may come, but they are having to learn on the job, the hard way. Throw in a few injuries and the odd player out of form, and the team certainly is not firing on all cylinders. Again, this is most likely a short-term problem. As much as many would like to see United diminish as a force, they won’t be going anywhere in the foreseeable future – but their current struggles lie in the simple fact that they are not quite as good as they used to be.

Of course all these post-mortems might be a tad premature considering that not only are the corpses not cold, but they are still breathing. It might seem unlikely, but English football could still have four teams in the knockout stages of the Champions League in a fortnight. United and Chelsea are certainly favourites to go through, though they may then face very difficult ties. And of course for Arsenal it was business as usual, progressing through a tricky group with a match to spare. Either way, football is not always predictable, not even in the group stages of the Champions League, and we can’t read too much into recent results.

The article was written by Howard Hockin for FootballFancast.com. Make sure to check out the latest news, blogs and podcasts at FFC – ed.

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