City lucky to win first leg – Monaco chief
LEONARDO Jardim rubbed salt into City’s wounds after masterminding Monaco to Champions League victory.
The Ligue 1 side will take no fear into the quarter-finals after overhauling a two-goal deficit to triumph over Pep Guardiola’s men, despite the absence of key players Kamil Glik and Radamel Falcao.
Jardim had spoken before the game that he did not think his side were any worse than the Blues, and took time afterwards to suggest City had been lucky to bring a lead into the second leg.
“We didn’t let them touch the ball in that first half,” he said. “It was harder in that second half, and we didn’t have the players on the bench to help.
“But look, City won that first game with a dose of luck, and we deserved to win. It’s a deserved qualification. Everyone is happy. We’ve achieved our objective, qualifying with a big performance. In that first half, we didn’t let City play at all anywhere on the pitch, high pressing, and we scored goals.
“It was tighter in the second half but, if you analyse the two matches, home and away, Monaco deserved to qualify.”
City defender John Stones gave an honest assessment of the first half. He said: “We were very sloppy. Not up to our standard in the first half. We wanted to correct that but we weren’t clinical enough in both boxes. We didn’t score enough and weren’t defensively solid enough.
“The second half didn’t reflect the whole scoreline. We were the City people know from this season. We should have scored more.”