‘We were punished’ – McGinn

John McGinn gave an honest assessment after Aston Villa were beaten 3-0 by Barcelona on Tuesday night.

The Villans showed signs of promise in the opening period at Camp Nou, but Raphinha’s second-half brace added to Lamine Yamal’s early opener to do the damage for Hansi Flick’s side.

McGinn felt Unai Emery’s men could have done better with some of the openings they created after falling behind, and admitted they were punished by the better side.

He said: “You come to places like this, you need to start the game well, you need to weather the storm. We didn’t do that tonight.

“They started very intense, very fast, and you need to ride that storm, but in that spell, we had chances to score ourselves and make better passes and better decisions.

“When you’re playing against a team like Barcelona, you don’t get a second chance, so tonight was a lesson for us, but definitely at times, positives to take.

“Tonight, Barcelona made the right decisions at the right times and scored really good goals.

“We knew what we were expecting, what we were coming up against, but for us to get three points tonight, we had to do a lot better.”

Having gone toe to toe with some of Europe’s elite sides in recent years, McGinn insists there is still a confidence that Villa can compete on this stage.

The Scotland international believes nights like this one at Camp Nou will help he and his teammates to battle better against the top outfits in the competition going forward.

“We’ve come a long way, we’ve shown we can compete with teams at this level, but our final pass tonight when we got in good positions let us down,” the Villa skipper continued.

“I think we’re competitive against teams at this level. I think we’ve shown that, whether that’s Bayern Munich, PSG, (against) teams at this level, we’re definitely competitive.

“We’ve shown we can we can make them sweat, cause problems, but tonight was a huge learning curve for us, and I’m sure it stands us in good stead for the future.”