Manchester Evening News

CITY Loss at Bridge is no need for alarm bells

- By TYRONE MARSHALL

THE external inquest into City’s defeat at Chelsea has been swift and sharp.

By early Sunday morning there were plenty of headlines to be found looking at where the Blues had gone wrong at Stamford Bridge and what weaknesses Chelsea had exposed in Pep Guardiola’s side.

That in itself is a sign of how well City are doing under Guardiola.

When your defeats in the league are as rare as hens’ teeth then every one of them is going to be dissected in detail as pundits look for signs of vulnerabil­ity.

But there’s very little for those pundits to get their teeth into. City were marginally below their best in west London, despite Guardiola’s glowing praise for his side, and were missing three of their most important players through injury.

They lost to a side who’ve won two of the last four Premier League titles, managed by one of the most in-demand coaches in Europe, with one of the most in-demand players in Europe leading the attack. Inquest over. In Guardiola’s first season in charge City were losing at Leicester and Everton and conceding eight goals in the process. There were questions to be asked and concerns to be addressed.

But since that 4-0 shellackin­g at Goodison Park on January 15 last year, City have played 71 Premier League games, losing only four of them, twice to Chelsea at Stamford Bridge, once to Liverpool at Anfield and in the Etihad derby against United last season. These aren’t results that should set alarm bells ringing. They’re defeats that even the very best sides will suffer from time to time. In these pages last week I boldly claimed that City could go the entire league season unbeaten if they avoided defeat at Stamford Bridge. I’ve learnt my lesson. But I still believe they could go the rest of the season unbeaten now. They lost a game that they were only marginal favourites to win. This was no catastroph­e.

City’s rivals can spend hours poring over the footage and the stats from the defeat at the Bridge looking for signs of weakness, but they won’t find anything they didn’t already know. Chelsea haven’t suddenly exposed an unknown chink in the Blues’ armour.

The scrutiny City have been under since Saturday night’s defeat shows what a significan­t occurrence these setbacks, if we can call them that, are. And while the Blyes continue to set such high standards and only slip up against the likes of Chelsea, Liverpool and United, then the post mortems will have the slimmest of pickings to dissect.

 ??  ?? City boss Pep Guardiola
City boss Pep Guardiola

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