…even the ball boys come under fire

PEP GUARDIOLA said everyone at the club would need to raise their game, including the ball boys, despite another thumping win.

Guardiola kicked his seat at half-time after what he considered a poor first-half performance and at one stage even beckoned a ball boy over, put an arm around him and gently briefed him on the need to move the ball quicker.

Guardiola insisted that the tempo had been slowed by his own players and though he was gratified that they responded in the second half, he couldn’t hide his frustration, kicking his chair in the dug out. Asked whether he kicked the seat out of anger, Guardiola joked: ‘No — it was because I don’t like the chair!’

And, probed on whether City will be more resilient than last season, when they won their first 10 games and then didn’t win in the next six fixtures, Guardiola said: ‘It’s too early to say. If you analyse 30 minutes in the first half, we were not ready to be there. Maybe over 90 minutes you cannot be there all the time. But it was slow.

‘If there was a foul, no one went to take the ball and start play. There was five, 10 seconds before someone goes to take the ball and start to play. When this happens everything is slow. So the ball boys were slow, everybody was slow.

‘We have to create in the game, to provoke the game. And we didn’t for most of the time in the first half. But in the second half, you could see the team was ready.

‘We started well but after that we forgot the ball should be moved. And the first half the ball was at the players’ feet —it’s not good. There were too many touches.’

Leroy Sane, who scored the opener and set up two, was the man of the match but Guardiola revealed he had been dropped at the start of the season because of a poor pre-season.

‘He didn’t arrive good,’ said Guardiola. ‘He didn’t make a good pre-season. He wasn’t good in the first games. He didn’t deserve to play. But now I have five strikers, all of them deserve to play. I need them sharp.’