Frankie de Jong concluded by saying: “When you play with ten players in Europe, you know you will suffer. We tried, we fought to reach the semi-finals. It’s a hard blow because we were convinced we would go through. We have no choice but to try to get up from it.”
The club’s vice-president Rafa Yosta said: “We believed we would go through, and it didn’t happen. It’s very disappointing, I want to thank the crowd that supported us. Congratulations to Paris Saint-Germain, they’re a great team, but it’s very difficult to play with ten players. This is football, this It wasn’t our day.”
Ilkay Gundoan looked very disappointed at the end: “There is no doubt that we feel a lot of frustration. Everything was in our hands, but we let it slip away from us. We wasted it and let PSG do it as easily as possible.”
Gundoan even complained about a penalty that he believed should have been whistled to his credit, after a suspected foul in the box in a 2:1 PSG situation, when the game was still open. “I deserved a penalty. I ran, and one of their players blocked me, there’s no doubt about it. I turned to the referee and told him there was a penalty, instead he gave me a yellow card.”
The local media also pointed an accusing finger at the judges. “Barcelona has been expelled from Europe”, read the headline in the Catalan “Sport”. “Controversial dismissal of Araujo in a critical minute, and changed the course of the game.”
