Last night's game will long be remembered and the coach will be blamed for us being outplayed tactically, individual players will be blamed for making mistakes and where the opposition were coached and played very well (they did). It will be seen as a great opportunity lost after having won the first two games in the Group of Death, with a squad that looks like it could, given the right circumstances and luck, go a long way in the CL.
However, it is worth trying the thought experiment of looking at last night from the end of the summer transfer window at the beginning of October this year. Would we, with the squad at the end of that transfer window that petered out in the EL semi-finals last year and was going to be drawn in the CL's Group of Death, have given ourselves a chance of competing with 2 of last year's CL semi-finalists? Probably not. We do have some players who sparkle because of potential, but a 33 year-old striker, a backup CM (neither of whom started in this game) and an LB from Porto in the last 6 months of his contract is simply not enough to transform last year's team to give us a good chance in the CL. And this is what too few of us fans will remember in the post-mortem of one of the most disappointing matches I have been unlucky enough to witness.
Club football is, at the end, about squads. Ajax can get to the CL semi-finals and Leicester can even win the PL as a one-off but the reason why we aspire to win the PL and CL is because we are amongst the clubs who spend the most on our squads. RB Leipzig didn't exist when we last won the CL but Red Bull has pumped in enough money to buy the coach and squad that, frankly, made their counterparts at our club look ordinary last night. The truth is that we needed to upgrade our squad (and maybe our coach) after we qualified for the CL but just did not.
Ask yourself a simple question - if we had bought Sancho, a quick CB and a CDM in the window, would we have gone out at the CL group stage? I don't think so and for that we must not lose the forest for the trees - while the Glazers control our beloved club, we will NEVER return to the sporting heights that we aspire to.
#GlazersOut