Pep: Barca would have given me the boot by now

PEP ADMITS HE WOULD HAVE BEEN AXED FOR TROPHYLESS SEASON AT HIS FORMER CLUBS

PEP Guardiola has admitted he would have been sacked if he had under-achieved in the same way for Barcelona or Bayern Munich as he has at City this season.

And the Blues boss has vowed to make the most of his ‘second chance’ to put everything right next season.

The Blues are left to fight for a top-four finish in a trophyless season as they face West Brom tonight.

And Guardiola was brutally honest that such a season would not have been good enough had he been at the Nou Camp or Allianz Arena, where the pressure to succeed was much greater.

“I am not staying here because I am Pep or what I have done a long time ago, I know what the problem is,” he said. “I am not going to be (wondering) all summer ‘Oh what will happen next season if I don’t win some titles’. Pressure I have when I arrived in Barcelona - at that club if in six months you don’t win you are really out.

“Like Barcelona or Bayern Munich, there you have to win by far.

“If not, they don’t give you a second chance. Here they gave me a second chance and we will try to do it. In my situation at a big club, I’m sacked. I’m out. Sure. Definitely.

“At the clubs I worked at before I am not here, but here we have a second chance and we will try to do it better than this season.”

VINCENT Kompany has already helped to fix one of Pep Guardiola’s two biggest problems this season.

And now the City boss sees his biggest challenge in the summer as making sure his exciting attacking players start to convert their chances.

Guardiola will focus on re-building his defence this summer, with at least two new full-backs and a centre-back on his transfer window shopping list.

But he made it plain that the resurgence of Kompany as skipper, leader and powerhouse defender has already gone some way towards sorting out a defence that leaked goals horribly in the middle of the season.

And in an assessment of where he needs to improve next season – when he feels his job is on the line – Guardiola, whose side host West Brom tonight, believes the quality of his players is good enough, hinting that maybe those players have under-achieved.

All season Guardiola has complained that City have not been good enough ‘in both boxes.’

And even though Kompany has brought a partial solution to the problems in their own box, Guardiola says he has failed to address it and will spend much of the summer analysing what he needs to do to sort things out.

“I have to be honest, I noticed we are having problems in the boxes and we didn’t solve it, so I have to analyse it myself this summer,” he said. “I have a feeling with Vincent we are stronger in the box.

“In football it depends on the quality of the players. The managers don’t play - we have to be here.

“It’s the quality of our players, and I think the quality of our players is quite enough to have been better.

“My only regret is that we were not able to fight to the end in the Premier League.

“One-and-ahalf months or two months ago it was already done, I think we have quality enough to have been there until the end.” So how do they need to improve?

“We make a good performance and we played quite well, most of the times in the games, or part of the games, but we were not clinical, we were not as solid as we expect, as maybe you need to be here,” he said. “Here a lot of things happen, in the boxes, everything is here and there and here and there. In other countries the process is more calm, here sometimes you can not control it, you try to control it but you cannot.

“And there you have to be strong, that’s true.

“The process is important but when you go to Crystal Palace, Burnley or West Brom it’s impossible not to feel what will be there, against Rondon, against Benteke, against these kind of players. “And this kind of balls, when they arrive and there is contact, all around the world it’s a foul, and here it’s not, that’s why you have to be strong, because you are not going to change the referee. Before I expected we could solve it, I realise we have to be strong there and strong when we arrive in the box.”