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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The International Olympic Committee (IOC) has barred Ukraine’s skeleton racer Vladyslav Heraskevych from wearing a helmet that honors Ukrainian athletes killed in the war with Russia.

“The IOC fully understands the desire ⁠of athletes to remember friends who lost their lives in that conflict,” IOC spokesman Mark Adams told a news conference ‌on Tuesday.

“He has done that in training and on social media he has expressed ‌his feelings ⁠but what we have said is this helmet contravenes the … guidelines,” he added.

Skeleton racer to wear black armband

Ukraine’s Olympic Committee on Tuesday asked the IOC to allow Heraskevych to wear the “helmet of remembrance” at the Milano-Cortina Games.

The committee made the request after an IOC representative told Heraskevych he cannot use the helmet he has worn in training, which features images of athletes killed since Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022.

The Ukrainian Olympic Committee insists the design contains no political slogans or discriminatory elements.

“The helmet was created to honor Ukrainian athletes killed while defending Ukraine or who became victims of ​Russia’s full-scale war against Ukraine,” Ukraine’s Olympic Committee said in a statement.

The IOC denied the request ahead of the skeleton competition, which starts Thursday.

However, the IOC announced that, as a compromise, Heraskevych will be permitted to wear a black armband when competing at the games. 

“We ‌feel this is a good compromise,” Adams said. He said the field of play needed to remain as neutral as possible.

“We need to keep that specific moment (on the field of play) as pure as we ​can ​for the competition. People can express themselves however they want to elsewhere,” he explained.

What else do we know about Heraskevych’s helmet honoring war victims?

Heraskevych, who is generally considered a medal hopeful at the games, said he could not understand how the helmet “hurt anyone.”

It included photos of figure skater Dmytro Sharpar, boxer Pavlo Ishchenko, hockey player Oleksiy Loginov, and others, some of whom were killed on the front lines, Heraskevych said.

Before the IOC’s decision Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy voiced his support for Heraskevych on social media. 

“This truth cannot be inconvenient, inappropriate, or called a “political demonstration at a sporting event.” It is a reminder to the entire world of what modern Russia is,” he wrote. 

Athletes from Russia are not allowed to take part in the Olympic Games under a Russian flag, but 13 Russians are taking part in the Winter Olympics as “Individual Neutral Athletes.”

The IOC suspended the Russian Olympic Committee in February 2022, arguing that Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, launched days after the Beijing Winter Games, violated the Olympic Truce.

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Edited by: Dmytro Hubenko