Rio Ferdinand and Nemanja Vidic had a poor game yesterday, particularly the latter, in not showing up when they were needed. Samuel Eto’o ran past Vidic with ease to score the opening goal and somehow that midget Messi managed to get to the ball first to head in to the net to make it 2-0.

Both our centre backs are rightly disappointed with their performance.

“We didn’t come here and give a good account of ourselves,” said Ferdinand. “We have played better 99 per cent of the time this season, but saying that we created four or five good opportunities to score, but they scored two goals at crucial times and two bad goals on our part. But we have no arguments, they were the better team on the day, you have got to do it on the day – if we played better or played to our strengths it would have been a different game, but if you don’t do it on the day you don’t deserve to win.”

Vidic agreed.

“We didn’t play well,” added Vidic. “They had a good game and scored at the right time – then we chased the game and they had space to counter attack us, they deserved to win.”