His red card, at least, was for an honest error. Guardiola and City had acquired Bravo over the summer because of his playmaking ability: A goalkeeper capable of building attacks, of retaining possession, is central to Guardiola’s nonnegotiable style. He accepts that, occasionally, it comes at a price; on Wednesday, it was a heavy one.

For 53 minutes, City had delivered on Guardiola’s promise to go toe to toe with Barcelona. Messi had given his team a slender advantage, thanks to an unfortunate slip in his own penalty area by Fernandinho, but there was little separating the two teams. Both created chances. Both pushed forward.

And then Bravo rushed from his penalty area to intercept a long ball, aiming to send a short, simple pass to one of his teammates. He misjudged it. The ball fell to Suárez, who tried to lift a shot over him. Bravo’s instincts took over. He reached out both hands and blocked the ball while still well out of his box. He could muster only the most cursory of protests to his inevitable punishment.

The crowing was immediate. There are many in England who bridled at Guardiola’s willingness to sacrifice the national team’s first-choice goalkeeper, Joe Hart, for Bravo, and they welcomed Bravo’s mistake here not only as the moment that the game got away from City — a finely balanced contest soon turning into a rout — but also as proof that Guardiola, on this one, was wrong.

Focusing on the particular circumstances of the victim, though, is not nearly so worthwhile as examining the pattern as a whole. Worse, it distorts the very fact that there is a clear pattern: When confronted by Barcelona, English teams, almost without fail, will at some point lose their heads.

In some ways, of course, treating each case in isolation provides succor. Immediately after the game, Bravo suggested that such a heavy defeat was in some way unjust — “We were comfortable, and it was clear the game changed after the sending-off,” he said — as if the result were in some way invalidated by his dismissal. City can cling to the idea that if only Bravo had not been correctly punished for his offense, things might have been very different.