Roberto Mancini believes Manchester City’s 5-0 thrashing of Aston Villa will count for nothing when they host Real Madrid in the Champions League.

City continued their unbeaten start to the defence of their Premier League title with their most emphatic display of the season at Eastlands on Saturday.

But, with just two points from their opening four Champions League group matches, their hopes of reaching the knock-out phase of Europe’s elite club competition are bleak.

And Mancini, who ruled out City’s chance of progressing from their group, admits facing the Spanish champions on Wednesday will be a far tougher proposition than the feeble challenge provided by struggling Villa.

“They are two different competitions and on Wednesday we play against one of the best teams in the world with a fantastic history,” Mancini said.

“We want to do a good job and we will have not much of a chance to go through but we will try.”

Mancini had been concerned about a lack of goals from his strikers but after Sergio Aguero and Edin Dzeko scored in the 2-1 win over Spurs, Argentina striker Aguero and his compatriot Carlos Tevez each scored twice against Villa.

City’s frontmen have now scored 13 times in the league this term and Mancini hopes that can spark a goal rush for the rest of the campaign.

“I hope from the last two games we changed something,” Mancini said.

“In our minds we had a period like this last year and the problem that we had in the first two months (are behind us).

“For us it’s important we’ve started to play well and scored six goals with our strikers in the last two games and we missed the strikers scoring.

“We can do better but I hope we are starting to find the form of last season. Also against Tottenham it was like the period that we had last year.”