Man U suffer Greek tragedy

Paris: Two former Champions League winners Manchester United and Borussia Dortmund who have both been having trouble in their domestic leagues suffered differing fortunes on Tuesday in their Champions League last 16 first leg ties. United’s woeful season, in manager David Moyes’s maiden campaign, took another turn for the worse as they went down 0-2 to Greek champions Olympiakos in Piraeus and the measure of the task awaiting the English champions at Old Trafford in three weeks time is that only one team has come back from a two goal first leg deficit before in the Champions League knockout stages.
United’s failure to score left English clubs goalless in this round, with both Arsenal and Manchester City failing to score last week although Chelsea can set that right against Galatasaray on Wednesday. Dortmund — beaten finalists last season — have also struggled to impose themselves in their league, they trail Bayern Munich by 20 points, but they can probably look forward to the quarter-finals of this competition as they beat Zenit St Petersburg 4-2 in Russia.
Manchester United had been just one of three teams coming into the knockout stages not to have lost thus far in this season’s competition but goals from veteran Alejandro Dominguez and a stunning curling effort by Costa Rican Joel Campbell — on loan from Arsenal — ended that record.
Moyes, who was the personal choice of Alex Ferguson to replace him whe he stepped down at the end of last season, admitted it had been a woeful performance. “It’s the worst we’ve played in Europe, that’s for sure,” said Moyes, whose side are struggling to even make the competition next season as they trail fourth-placed Liverpool by 11 points. “It was a really poor performance. We never really got going from the start and we didn’t deserve anything because of the way we played. I take responsibility. It’s my team,” he said.