City’s European dream was brought to a halt at the Round Two stage, with Claudia Zornoza’s powerful drive on the stroke of half-time enough to hand the Spanish outfit a 2-1 aggregate victory at the Academy Stadium.
Despite ultimately coming up short, Taylor’s side were the dominant force after the break, with Hayley Raso hitting the bar and Ellen White seeing an effort cleared off the line among a host of chances.
And while defeat against Las Blancas left a bitter taste in the mouth, the City boss believes we can use that to kick on in our push for Women’s Super League, FA Cup and Continental Cup glory this season.
“I’d say the Spanish teams have a bit more know how, and can be more streetwise in seeing games out. It’s something we need to be better at and improve on,” Taylor reflected.
“We need to use (the disappointment) as fuel now for the rest of the season. We’re in a situation where we’re looking at domestic competition and need to make sure we perform really well in those.
“That’s the only way we can look at it. It’s a big disappointment, we were hoping to be in this competition and I felt we did enough last season to be in this competition.
“Now we face not being in Europe, so we have to focus on the domestic competitions now for sure.”
Assessing our performance against Madrid, Taylor felt that City were missing a clinical edge at the Academy Stadium, as we bowed out in heartbreak circumstances.
Nonetheless, he insisted that these sorts of situations can happen in football, particularly after we put in such a ruthless display away to Everton in our WSL curtain-raiser.
He said: “We battled really well in the second half, I thought we dominated.
“I felt we had some really good opportunities and we needed to be more clinical.
“We were on Saturday and sometimes it clicks like that, but tonight it just felt like the longer the game went on, Madrid made it more and more difficult putting bodies behind the ball.
“We just weren’t able to get that goal.”
