PEP: Players not to blame for Covid
IF City keep up their current form, they could be top of the Premier League table as early as Wednesday evening.
Wins in their last four league games have moved them up to third in the table, and the two teams above them play each other at Anfield tomorrow.
Unless United pull off what their manager would consider an upset and beat Jurgen Klopp’s champions, a home victory over Crystal Palace for the Blues tomorrow will give them the chance to top the table three days later when they are scheduled to come up against a Covid-hit Aston Villa.
City’s position is ominous for the rest of the league.
They have never been seen as a contender since a 5-2 humiliation at the hands of Leicester City in their second game of the season, and no wins from matches against Liverpool, Spurs and United were missed opportunities to make a statement win.
Three points at Stamford Bridge is the closest Pep Guardiola’s side have come to that, especially because they had so many players self-isolating after positive Covid tests, but less so because of the stuttering form of Frank Lampard’s Chelsea. Not only do City appear to have solved the major issue of last season of conceding too many goals, and the major issue from the first part of this season of not scoring enough goals, but they also appear to be developing a trait that proved successful in their title-winning seasons. When they came up against no real opposition in the 2017/18 title-winning campaign, Guardiola used team meetings to show all the records that the players could break in a bid to ensure they did not let their standards drop – the last kick of their season brought an historic 100 Premier League points. And in the heat of their ferocious battle with Liverpool the following year, City’s boss managed to shut out all distractions in what unfolded as a heavyweight bout where one team would strike a blow and move to the top of the league before they were pegged back hours or days later.
Few are better and more experienced at knowing how to cope with the physical and mental
Few are better and more experienced at knowing how to cope with the demands of a title race than Guardiola
demands of a title race better than Guardiola, and in recent weeks he has pointedly refused to engage in any discussion of the season beyond the next game.
That continued on yesterday, where an invitation to discuss his side’s inviting run of fixtures coming up in his press conference produced the mantra for the day:
“In my head, and hopefully in the head of the players, it is just Crystal Palace.”
The smile that followed his repeated claim later that ‘Crystal Palace is the only target’ said a lot.
While City are able to direct their focus on one game at a time, their rivals cannot afford to take their eyes off the Blues.