WHILE Mark Hughes dusts off the maps of Europe this summer, embarrassed Stuart Pearce will be heading back to his drawing board.

While he sits there, scratching his head, sifting the wreckage of what might have been, the Blues' boss will no doubt contemplate how his team finished so far behind a Rovers side that was trailing in City's wake for the first four months of the season.

Pearce knows major surgery is required on his largely inherited squad but he is also all too aware that financing such changes is going to be impossible - even with the television cash bonanza due on stream next summer.

Despite his public pronouncements, the manager is alert to the fact that he will have to sell big to buy big, and that means a huge question mark against the futures of contract holdouts Sylvain Distin and Joey Barton, but hopefully not valuable youngster Micah Richards on whom the covetous eyes of the Premiership's super rich are already being trained.

Pearce faces a delicate balancing act for sure over the summer, particularly with supporters still unhappy at seeing favourite son and Academy product Shaun Wright-Phillips sold off in the last closed season.

Those same paying customers are still apt to wonder how, with é21m banked, their club manages to finish behind the likes of Fulham, Bolton, Wigan and Rovers when mathematicians would have to put two of their average gates together to match City's level of support.

It is no wonder so many City fans feel short changed looking at the final Premiership table this morning.

In racing parlance, Rovers plugged on at one pace through beaten horses to nab sixth spot while City performed like non-stayers after bursting from the stalls - changing the jockey, by the way, isn't going to help at this stage.

Demoralising

There is nothing quite so demoralising as watching a club you feel should not, by the criteria of size and scope, be your equal, using your arrival at their ground as the basis for a party.

Yesterday was payback time for Rovers' supporters who had to endure thousands of City fans celebrating wildly in their backyard following the Blues' promotion to the top flight back in 2000.

Hughes, happy with the work of his top men and having given his squad most of the week off, decided to use the Euro celebration to give his best players Pedersen, Reid and Bellamy an afternoon off to collect awards. There was, though, a start for Paul Dickov, whose first game next season may well be back in the City shirt.

There was no such tinkering from Pearce, who was still seething at his side's run of one win and eight defeats from the previous nine league outings.

He welcomed back Distin, perhaps for the final time, and Kiki Musampa, and out from the side that lost to Arsenal on Thursday night went Jihai Sun and Albert Riera. Abandoned, too, went the usual and preferred 4-4-2 formation, ditched in favour of 4-3-3 as City attempted to go out with a bang.

Not that it was easy to discern formations in such a stop-start contest devoid of much action in the opening quarter other than a serious injury to Rovers' Aaron Mokoena.

There was a moment of levity just after the half hour when a male streaker decided to pit his wits against 16 stewards in front of the CIS Stand. In the end it proved a big fuss about very little.

When the opening goal arrived it also had a touch of comedy about it. David James came to make a routine catch from a Sergio Peter corner but collided with Richards and dropped the ball, leaving Zurah Khizanishvili to convert from a dozen yards.

The second one was much better, though there was more than a touch of offside about the move that saw Emerton race down the right and cross for Shefki Kuqi to glide the ball in.

That should have been that for Rovers but Tugay's ludicrous two-footed lunge at David Sommeil gave referee Howard Webb no alternative but to send him off.

Not that the Blues had the wit or the wherewithal to make use of the extra man. Nine defeats in ten says it all and they were as lacking in ideas in this one just like most of the rest. It was humiliating for their 5,000 travelling fans.

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