Yaya Toure apologizes to Manchester City fans after red card in Champions League

Yaya Toure being shown the red card in the 81st minute, thus putting paid to all of City’s hopes

Wednesday’s Champions League night was a rather eventful one for Ivorian midfielder Yaya Toure. He is the general-in-chief marshalling Manchester City’s midfield, and is used to being in the middle of a lot of defensive as well as offensive action anyway, but the match against CSKA Moscow saw his box-to-box tag taken to its extremes.

Within the opening 10 minutes, Toure scored with a delicously curving free kick to bring the scores level at 1-1.

However, with ten minutes to the end of the match, and City trailing by a goal, Toure let frustration get the better of him and completely irrationally pushed Roman Eremenko to the ground; his hard-earned reputation in shambles.

Toure has apologized to his club’s fans on Twitter, after what will go down as one of the most disappointing in the club’s recent history.

City fans - I am sorry for my red card. I feel it is important to apologise for this.

— Yaya Touré (@YayaToure) November 5, 2014

It’s a crisis of confidence: Manuel Pellegrini

City are now bottom of their group and face an uphill task to qualify for the knockout stages from a group which includes Bayern Munich and Roma.

Manager Manuel Pellegrini told Sky Sports 5: “It's very difficult to understand why we played so badly.”

“The first half especially, we didn't see the team we normally see. We didn't shoot once at their goal, we just had Yaya's free-kick, and we gave away two easy goals.”

The manager explained City’s poor run was because of a “crisis of confidence”, and it shall be interesting to keep track of how much longer City’s owners keep their faith in him after such a dud on the continental front.