Well, I'm absolutely zonked. Exhausted. Beat. What an absolutely unnecessary, mind-blowingly agonising evening. What should have been a tie settled in the first 30 minutes in London lasted another 180 minutes. In regulation, it was basically head-shaking incomprehension for 110 minutes, as we dominated to no avail, and left ourselves continually open to the odd Roma counter-attack. No goals ever came, and in the last 3-4 minutes of extra time, I was sure Roma would spring the classic sucker punch and score a second. But they didn't, and must now be kicking themselves for so obviously playing for penalties as soon as the second half had started.
Football games and seasons turn on a dime, and it looks like ours has just turned on the smallest of dimes. A loss on penalties, and I'm sure it would have been curtains. But we dug it through, and must now believe that we have luck and momentum on our side.
I'm not even going to be bothered with the player ratings; we were all mediocre on the night, with only Clichy and Nasri seeming to be the source of any creativity. But on the penalties, our boys became giants. Following from Eduardo's shocking first miss, RVP, Walcott, Nasri, Denilson, Kolo, Sagna and Diaby all had excellent penalties. Penalties are a lottery, but they do give hint of confidence to come.
We really didn't need to come to penalties. As I'd said following Burnley - we need to start converting chances and domination into goals. Maybe with the likes of Barca and Bayern in the horizon - teams that will come at us - we may have a chance. We'll see then, on the 20th of March. Fingers crossed the draw doesn't put us with another English team. High chance of that though.
Good night. I need to crash.
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