Pep Guardiola said in a number of ways on Tuesday that Manchester City have to be better if they are to challenge until the end.
Pep Guardiola
It felt like Pep Guardiola wanted to make a point. And not in the sense of tackling every humanitarian crisis in one sitting, but a different kind of absorbing.
The Manchester City manager is not always engaging. It is difficult to be when you are seeing the same faces four times a week asking you questions that you probably wouldn’t choose to be answering if you could plan your day. Guardiola goes through good moods and bad moods like the rest of us do, so it is simply a reality that sometimes in press conferences he is happy to chat and other times he is not.
He had a point to make about the Liverpool game, and the easy narrative that winning it means they will challenge Arsenal just as losing it would have meant they were out. “It would be so boring if I were to sit here saying how good everything was at Anfield,” he said at the end of Tuesday’s sitdown with journalists. “I would be wrong.”
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That may be, and there wouldn’t be any Blues who could pretend Sunday’s win over the defending champions was perfect. They weren’t good enough to take advantage of their superiority in the first half, and they struggled again in the second half before being rescued by what Guardiola referred to as a deflection.
He is right that City are not good enough to avoid moments of chance becoming key moments in games – it is partly why there has been such anger this season at refereeing decisions – but it is also right that he would not be airing these views if he did not think they could soon be good enough. The immediate worry for Guardiola is that they could throw away their position before their chance to get on the training pitches when they play a team that they conceded three second-half goals to in December.
“If we behave in the second half like that happened, it will be so difficult. That is what I’m concerned with,” he said. “Of course we want three points and after Saturday we have a long week before Newcastle and a long week against Leeds that we need desperately after this incredible run of games for three or four months with a few players. It will happen if we do what we have to do, I want to deserve the three points and the way we have to play to stay there. That is my feeling.”
Guardiola talks of a young team, and a new team, when he says that he doesn’t know if they can put a title-winning run together. One of the words that is generally used about this City team at the business end of the season, ominous, is not one that can be put forward when there are barely more than a handful of players left who have won multiple league titles with the club.
However, they do have a manager that has been there, done that, and got more T-shirts than anybody else still in the game. For all the times that pundits have been silly enough to write him off, Guardiola is still there at the top of the game and believing he still knows exactly what it takes to get this team to push Arsenal all the way this season.
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“They are an incredible group of players and a lot of them are new and it is the first time experiencing the pressure to win the titles. That needs time and we don’t have it. But I have the feeling that I’m pretty convinced about the diagnosis about why we play good when we play good and why we don’t play good when we don’t play good.”
That’s where the long weeks before Newcastle and Leeds come in, so if City can get past Fulham on Wednesday the schedule is unusually light for them for the rest of the month to help them make the improvements needed to really pile the pressure on Arsenal in the final two months of the season – including in the Carabao Cup final in less than six weeks.
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The Carabao Cup Final will see Arsenal v Manchester City at London’s Wembley Stadium this March.