Tackle still niggles Neil
NEIL WARNOCK has re-ignited his war of words with Pep Guardiola by claiming Kevin De Bruyne should have been in the dock as well as Joe Bennett after a stormy FA Cup clash last season.
The Cardiff manager says nothing was made of De Bruyne’s tackle that put Jazz Richards out for months while his defender Bennett was made public enemy No1 for his scything challenge on Leroy Sane, who ended up missing three games.
The two teams meet again today and Warnock said: “We all talked about Bennett’s tackle, but if you watched in the 50th minute there was a tackle from De Bruyne on Richards that put him out for 17 games.
“Which was the worse? I suppose a tackle on Richards probably doesn’t sell any papers or make any news.
“Everybody wrote about this one tackle, which Benno knows was a disgrace, but there were one or two ‘clever’ tackles that went on.
“I’m not sure the referee, Lee Mason, even booked De Bruyne but he caught Richards’ knee badly and should at least have had a yellow card.”
Guardiola refused to get drawn into another slanging match but said Sane would not be haunted by the incident that many feared had left him with a broken leg.
His leg bent horribly before he fell.
“I didn’t speak with him, but he’s forgotten it,” said Guardiola, who called for more protection for players after the January clash.
“It was months ago, it’s a new game and a different competition.”
Asked about his verbal exchanges with Warnock that followed the cup tie, Guardiola gave a sarcastic reply.
“They were nice words that we had!” he said. “I’m not going to discuss a game that happened six or seven months ago or the decisions of the referee. I’m not going to play that game.
“I asked for all players to be protected – not just City players. That’s why referees are there.”
Guardiola accepts Cardiff will adopt a similar physical approach but says his players will have to be smart and quicker on the ball as they bid to bounce back after their shock midweek Champions League defeat by Lyon.
“The Premier League is physical,” he said. “Not just Cardiff. I realised that when I came here. Cardiff have a way to play and we have to adapt.
“The way they play, physicality is going to happen. If we are slow we’ll have more contact with opponents; if we are smarter then maybe there will be less contact. Sometimes those tackles happen because we are slow.” Striker Sergio Aguero yesterday signed a new £220,000-a-week contract that will keep him at City until 2021 – when he will be 33 – then revealed he had been playing in pain for the past five years until summer surgery on a knee. “I’ve been playing with pain all that time,” said Aguero, City’s 204-goal all-time leading scorer. “The doctors and physios have made an effort day by day. The pain in the knee used to make me miss some training sessions. During the last two-and-a-half months of last season I decided to undergo surgery and now I can say it was the right decision.
“It was a hard decision to take but I had to do it because, if not, the pain would have remained there. I could play in the World Cup without any pain and now it feels like a new knee.
“This season has started well because I couldn’t do proper pre-seasons in previous years.”
While Aguero is fit and firing, influential left-back Benjamin Mendy, who has missed the past two games, has been ruled out for an indefinite period with a bruised metatarsal.