Silva’s handball red dashes City hopes in brave demise

“In football anythingis possible” was Pep Guardiola’srallying cry and while Manchester City failed to pull off a Lazarus act for the ages, this was a definite one-off wonder of a contest that thrilled all witnesses.

- Jamie Jackson

Particularly, the first 45 minutes of mayhem headlined by Vinicius Junior apparently being ruled offside by the referee, Clément Turpin, then onside, which meant Bernardo Silva was then penalised for handball, sent off, and the Brazilian then scored from the spot. Further entertainment also derived froma Guardiola yellow card, Erling Haaland’s equaliser, and a slew of goalmouth incident that mostly continued after the break - including late finishes from Rayan Ait-Nouri and Fede Valverde that were ruled offside, and one from Vinicius that counted.

The bottom lineis this: at the final whistle City were unable to overturn the 3-0 first-leg deficit and so are out, and Real Madrid through to the quarterfinals.

To prosper City required a comeback as scintillating as the 2011-12 title-clinching win over QPR. To try to engineer this, Guardiola’s linuep was less adventurous than last Wednesday’s 3-0 losing XI, the directness of Savinho and Antoine Semenyo discarded for the guile of Rayan Cherki and Tijjani Reijnders. Marc Guéhi and Nico O’Reilly were also out - and Matheus Nunes and Ait-Nouri in.

When Valverde spurned a gilded chance to score a fourth of the tie when through inside the opening 60 seconds - the stabbed attempt dribbled into Gianluigi Donnarumma’s gloves - this ignited a chaotic period of action.