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Manuel Pellegrini has lifted the lid on his apparent mathematical mix-up in Munich on Tuesday night.

After City's 3-2 win over European champions Bayern Munich, Pellegrini was asked whether he considered throwing on Sergio Aguero to go in search of the fourth goal that would have seen his team top the group.

But Pellegrini seemed to suggest in his post-match interview that he thought City still needed two more goals to leapfrog Bayern at the top of the group.

And at his weekly press conference, the City manager apologised for his role in the confusion but insisted he didn't have a 'guilty conscious'.

Pellegrini said: “It shouldn’t have been happening, I agree with you.

"It is very easy why it happened. Before the match I knew we had to win 3-0 because we needed one goal more than they scored (at the Etihad).

"After when they score the first goal, I continued (thinking) that 3-1 was not enough because they had a better goal difference so I continued that we had to win by three goals, 3-0 or 4-1.

"After when they scored the second goal, I didn’t continue thinking about what happened if we scored four goals. That was my mistake because not many teams score four goals against Bayern Munich.

"I tried to think better about how to arrange the game that we are losing 2-0. First of all I recognise absolutely my mistake but I don’t have any guilty conscience about what we did because we always tried to score the fourth goal.

"Remember that I changed Silva after 70 minutes for Negredo, not for Kompany, not for Boyata, so we continued with two strikers trying to score. In the last five or seven minutes, Bayern Munich had 80 per cent of the ball so we tried with Rodwell to recover the ball, to attack, not to defend. I apologise for me and the team that we couldn’t score four goals against Bayern Munich.”

City's failure to score a fourth in the Allianz Arena meant they finished second in their group and will now face a tough task against one of the group winners in the second round.

Pellegrini, however, said his team fear no one.

He added: “I am not afraid of who we are going to play in the round of 16. I don’t believe some teams are weaker than the other teams.

"I believe the 16 best teams in Europe are all exactly the same for us. I think the trust the team has after beating Bayern Munich in their own stadium, that is much much more important than being first in the group. That is so, so important."