A reality check for the women's game as Lyon cut down Manchester City

Manchester City provided some razzle dazzle for their Champions League semi-final – face painting, shiny flags on every seat – but the match was a reality check, just as the past few days have been for the British women’s game.

Only 24 hours after the folding of the top flight Notts County women’s team by an owner unwilling to keep providing subsidies underlined the struggle for financial viability for a club without a wealthy men’s side, City were taken down by Lyon. We saw in the 3-1 defeat that the French game is well ahead of Britain’s in its development.

There will be more evidence next weekend, when as many as 15,000 supporters are expected for the second leg to be played on the main Stade de Lyon pitch. The prospect of using the Etihad stadium was unthinkable on Saturday for a match which drew 3,614 – extremely modest by comparison.

City’s star player Carli Lloyd was prickly when it was suggested to her that the side’s dismantling, after Swede Kosovare Asllani equalised out Lyon’s early penalty, might be down the French women’s game being well ahead on the development curve.

“They pay a lot of money to get those players there too,” she said. “I think if France was winning World Cups and Olympics you could probably say they are way ahead but at the minute they are just a good side; play great football. I’ve always thought that but they are just footballers. We play as well. We should not respect a team that much. ” City manager Nick Cushing – who lacked a back-up plan in a disappointing second half - talked about his players being “not that far away from Lyon.”

But none of those observations ring true. France is reaping the benefits of having committed earlier to the women’s game and when it came down to it, the visiting side looked stronger, faster, technically better than City.

It had been seen as the battle of the two great Americans - Lloyd versus Lyon’s Alex Morgan but when the French coach Gerard Precheur decided as early as the 55th minute that Morgan wasn’t cutting it, he hooked her, and was able to bring on one of the women’s sport’s great attacking talents – Eugenie Le Sommer – instead. Morgan might not even start next Saturday’s second leg.

Lloyd was made to look ordinary, too, and was a bystander - in part, because some of her teammates did not seem to be operating at her mental level. Some of the runs she anticipated were not made and she gestured where she would have liked them.

Lloyd has only been at City two months and may be a dominant force if she returns next season and becomes more accustomed to the European game, which is more technical and far less physical than America’s. She certainly carries herself in the mixed zones in a way that underlines the more uncompromising nature of the American women’s game’s. She is harder and colder than the rest.

“You definitely get away with things in the [English] domestic competitions that you wouldn’t today,” she admitted. “You can maybe afford to play a certain way which will work in the league. It’s great to see we are here and being a part of it. The more English teams experience it the better they will become. “

Notts County demise, on the eve of the new Spring Series reflects the fact that too few fans are paying through the turnstiles, and with the 2017/18 season being running as a winter league, in tandem with the men’s game, further tests lie ahead. City’s next one is that second leg in the Massif Central. “It’s only half-time. We still believe in ourselves,” said Lloyd. But the team have a mountain to climb.