“I DON’T believe,” Roberto Mancini said in the bowels of the Stadio San Paolo, with the sound of the occasional celebratory thunderflash still echoing around the concrete corridors, “that a team can end the group stage of the Champions League without a single point to their name.”

That, the manager of Manchester City explained, is why he anticipates a wholehearted effort from Villarreal in their final match against Napoli.

With one match to go in Group A, Villarreal have lost twice to Bayern Munich, twice to City and once to the team who beat the Premier League leaders on Tuesday. Five matches, zero points.

To expect the Spanish club to win on pride alone against a side glimpsing immortality is surely to ask too much.

A win for Napoli in a fortnight’s time would see them through. So would a draw, were City to achieve anything less than a win against a team topping the Bundesliga.

Finding themselves in such a position, many English fans would no doubt take comfort from the belief that winning the Premier League is a lot harder than claiming the German title.

Whether such a view is justified or myopic, the depth of experience in Europe’s leading club championship on which Bayern are able to draw is vastly greater than that available to City: the difference between four European Cup victories on the one hand and two seasons of participation, four decades apart, on the other.

City’s European inexperience has been badly exposed this autumn and in particular this week, even though Napoli, with their relatively unusual formation of three at the back, a solid midfield quartet and a trio of fast-breaking attackers, are now a well-known quantity.

Given Group A was always going to present a stiff test, Mancini should surely have been able to devise a specific counter to Walter Mazzarri’s tactics, particularly after Christian Maggio and Edinson Cavani had mugged them on the break for the goal that gave the Italians a point at the Etihad Stadium.

Mancini himself has plenty of European experience as a player and a coach. He had two months to think about it yet came up with nothing. Suggestions that City might have fared better against a team with a more orthodox defensive alignment are not to be taken seriously, since Bayern’s comfortable 2-0 win at the Allianz Arena was achieved with a perfectly conventional back four.

On a night such as Tuesday, match statistics can be worse than useless. City had 62 per cent of the possession and completed 634 passes to Napoli’s 277. Yet they were not unlucky to lose and the shot with which Marek Hamsik struck the post might have widened the margin.

In drawing 2-2 with Benfica at home on the same night, Manchester’s other team enjoyed 64 per cent of the possession, as did Bayern, beating Villarreal 3-1, and Real Madrid, trouncing Dinamo Zagreb 6-2.

There is no one way to win in Europe, but experience and flexibility are beyond price.

In City’s case, not even an Italian manager and a squad with players from Spain, Argentina, Italy, Belgium, France, Bosnia, Russia and elsewhere could demonstrate much of the sophistication for which they were acquired, while the four English players in their starting line-up were not able to infuse the rest with what is seen as the typically Anglo-Saxon virtue of non-stop aggression in the fabulously atmospheric San Paolo.

Perhaps Premier League stars quickly grow unused to the sort of ambience associated with such grounds as the Bombonera, the Velodrome and the San Paolo, where the fans are in their places an hour and a half before the kick-off and see it as part of their mission to frighten the opposition to death.

Whenever City had the ball in the last five minutes, their side packed with attacking substitutes (Samir Nasri, Sergio Aguero, Adam Johnson) thrown on in a desperate attempt to snatch something from the occasion, the whistles from 60,000 lips must have felt like a band of steel tightening around the visiting players’ heads.

The real headache, however, will belong to the urbane Mancini.

Winning the Premier League title this season, City’s first championship since 1968, would be an achievement sufficient to justify his existence and all his works. But if they fail to reach this season’s Champions League knockout rounds, they will find themselves doubly handicapped: first by the encumbrance of the need to put out weakened sides in umpteen Europa League ties, second by the missed opportunity to continue their necessary education in a higher form of the game.