Hughes Gives Credit To Racing

The hosts won the match 3-1 although the result did not affect City's progress into the latter stages of the competition as thay had already won the group prior to the game on Thursday night.

"Ideally we'd have preferred to have won the game but credit to Racing, they're a good team," the City boss said after the match.

"Their motivation was to try and get into the next round. We'd already qualified so that might have taken a little bit of edge out of our game.

"We made changes as we wanted to give the likes of Shaun Wright-Phillips, Stephen Ireland and Vincent Kompany a little bit of a rest. I think that was important given the number of games coming up. They're key players for us.

"In the second half we just needed to steady ourselves and we did that. We got more games into some of the players who haven't had a lot of football.

"Gelson (Fernandes) got 90 minutes which is important while Caicedo has come on and made an impression. We have to take the positives out of the game.

"We've topped the group and that was the order of the day. We're grateful for that."