Pep Guardiola is less bothered about the gap to Arsenal at the top of the Premier League table than he is about Manchester City performances
Pep Guardiola said Manchester City must improve or they can forget about catching Arsenal in the Premier League. The Blues stayed six points behind the leaders with a comeback victory at Anfield but City’s manager is not looking up when he can see what is directly in front of him.
City again lapsed in the second-half at Anfield – a common theme for their season as they went behind to a Dominiki Szoboszlai rocket after failing to convert their first-half play into any goals. However happy Guardiola was to come back and pick up a rare win at Liverpool, he knows that there are practical issues to address that are more important than thinking about the title race.
“I understand your question. Every time in the last weeks when I go before the game in flash interviews always is you lose you’re losing everything and going to disappear from planet Earth,” he said. “What I’m saying is what do we have to do to beat Fulham? What do we have to do to make the second half closer to the first? What is the reason why in the second half we are still dropping our performances?
“If we don’t improve that, we will not win – maybe if not against Fulham, against Newcastle or the next. I understand how nice three points or nine points and this kind of stuff is, but it doesn’t make for winning titles or arriving at the latter stages to be close to fighting for titles.”
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City looked like they were about to turn the screw on Arsenal when they beat Forest after Christmas for their eighth victory in a row in all competitions, but they have stumbled since. The monster run that City have gone on in previous seasons is yet to materialise, and Guardiola isn’t sure that it will ever come with a different team. Until they get better at controlling games than they currently are, the City manager will not be getting carried away.
“When we have 60 or 70 per cent of new players, we don’t have what we had in the past,” he said. “After the second or third season we had done it, we are able to do it but now we have to prove it. I don’t know if we are able to win three, four, five, six games in a row. I don’t know. I don’t know.
“We drew at Spurs and all the comments after that second half at Spurs. It was not two months ago, it was days ago. They have done really good things. I have the feeling for many many months but not consistent enough to control many aspects to win the games. We equalised the [Liverpool] game with a deflected cross from Rayan Cherki, and goes to the head of Erling and intelligent run from there. From a deflection.
“And we saved with an incredible save from Gigio from a deflection. That is football. And that intervenes. But when we are a champion team, even in deflections you control the other aspects that don’t make the deflections the key points to win the game. And still we are in that phase.”
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