MANCHESTER -- Manuel Pellegrini vowed that Manchester City will fight to the end in their bid to qualify for the knockout stages of the Champions League after a draw with Roma left them facing an uphill task.
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The Premier League champions, who had already lost to Bayern Munich, have only taken one point in Group E and are three behind Serie A runners-up Roma, who came from behind to equalise through captain Francesco Totti.
City, who took the lead through Sergio Aguero in the fourth minute, have failed to get out of the group stages in two of the past three seasons and have back-to-back games against CKSA Moscow next.
And manager Pellegrini said in a news conference: "We have just one point from six but also we are just three points behind Roma so there are a lot of things [to consider].
"We hope we can win [the] next game in Russia. We will see what happens against Bayern Munich. We have 12 more points to fight [for] and we will fight to the end to try and qualify."
The City manager accepted his side were not at their best, explaining: "We didn't play well, especially in the first half. I think that today we didn't play in the way we normally play to score a goal. In the last 20 minutes we more similar to the team you usually see here."
Pellegrini defended his decision to start with a 4-4-2 formation after Roma outnumbered City in midfield and he had to change tactics when he brought on Frank Lampard.
"We play a lot of games against strong teams in this way and we do it very well," he added. "Maybe today we were not very accurate with our passing so when we started losing too many balls we did not have enough midfielders to recover."
Roma's former England defender Ashley Cole, who was playing his first match back in his homeland since joining the Italian club, hailed the visitors' performance.
The former Chelsea left-back told ITV: "I think it was a good performance from the boys after going 1-0 down so early in the game and we showed a lot of character, determination and belief in the team.
"Maybe we should have won but the boys can be proud of themselves for going up against the [Premier League] champions, a great team.
"We're probably a bit disappointed we didn't win but it's a good point for us."
Coach Rudi Garcia, who has overseen a fine start to the season with five straight Serie A wins, felt his side had made a statement.
He said: "We have shown we are at the height of this group. We have played against the champions of England, one of the richest clubs in the world and it wasn't easy to start off one goal down.
"We have a good team and took advantage of our good moments."
Information from Press Association was used in this report.