Samir Nasri wheels away to celebrate after opening the scoring with a screamer against Roma on Wednesday night

Manchester City Football Club confirmed their participation in the Champions League’s Round of 16 after getting the all important win over Italian side, A.S. Roma at the Stadio Olimpico in Rome. The odds seemed to be stacked against the Citizens who were looking for their first ever win in Italy as they were forced to do without the services of captain Vincent Kompany, top scorer Sergio Aguero and influential midfielder Yaya Toure. A win was the only result that would go closest to guaranteeing their qualification to the knockout stages while a draw would only have sufficed had CSKA Moscow lost out Bayern Munich.

David Silva congratulates teammate Pablo Zabaleta after the latter scored City’s second on the night

The mathematics turned out be much simpler in the end as our beloved City went on to beat Roma by two goals to nil, while the match in Munich ended with the Bavarians cruising to a comfortable three nil win over Russians CSKA Moscow. All’s well that ends well is what they say in this part of the world, and if you’re a City fan like me, you will be happy to see that the Group Stages of the Champions League have indeed ended well. The same cannot be said of our European destiny however as we continue to fight amongst Europe’s big boys. Amidst all the jubilance however, we need to realize how close we came to crashing out of Europe’s premier club football tournament, and in the process we must give a lot of credit to Manuel Pellegrini and the players. For the most part of the Group Stages, it seemed that we were about to do a repeat of our first two Champions League campaigns where we crashed out at the first hurdle, but things picked up for us only when Sergio Aguero managed to almost single handedly beat Bayern Munich at the Etihad in our penultimate game of the group. That was undoubtedly the turning point for our Champions League ambitions and it would have been almost impossible for us to qualify had we lost that game. All in all, I think that Pellegrini and every single member of his staff and every single one of our players deserve a lot of credit and respect for the way they turned this around. In this day and age, we see so many athletes and their coaches or managers getting stick when their team is not performing up to expectations, but on the flipside, it is difficult to see these same athletes or managers receive the same amount of adulation and credit when their teams are in fact doing well.

City players celebrate qualifying to the next round after the match against Roma is brought to an end

A lack of European progress was a big factor that sealed Roberto Mancini’s departure from City two seasons ago so similarly, a good run in the Champions League would work wonders for our Chilean boss who is already endearing himself to the City faithful after navigating us to the Premier League and the League Cup last season. The manner in which he and the players turned it around in our last two matches is absolutely no mean feat and both parties deserve a lot of credit for the character they showed to get back up after having their backs to the wall. If Manchester City can keep performing at the same level which they displayed in their last two European games then the future promises to be very exciting, and although only time will tell whom we are drawn against in the Round of 16, I believe that we have no reason to fear anyone.