Pep: Baggies victory was one of best this season
PEP Guardiola ended deadline day by purring over his City players.
The end of January brought City’s 99th, 100th, and 101st goal of an incredible season as they moved 15 points clear at the top of the Premier League – with a goal difference 24 better than their nearest rivals.
Only Manuel Pellegrini’s 2013/14 side have managed it in fewer games and City were impervious as they swept away Alan Pardew’s strugglers without breaking a sweat.
The West Brom manager admitted after the game that he had wanted to give his players a cuddle, such was their ordeal across 90 minutes.
If three points are as regular as a weekend at the Etihad, the Baggies were perhaps unfortunate to run into a Guardiola side at the top of their game.
Nineteen shots with ten on target and 74 per cent possession delighted the manager, although as ever he spotted something they must improve.
“I’m so happy because today I feel we had one of the best performances we played this season,” he said.
“Playing better than the way we played today will be quite difficult.
“But in knockouts and finals, against Arsenal [in the League Cup final], we have to be more clinical in front of goal or we will be in trouble.
“We had an amazing game – the joy to watch them play, the joy they have to play in that way, but we missed a lot of chances.
“Against top teams, it will be a problem. Today was a game for 7-0, 8-0, 7-1 because there were clear chances for the last pass.
“Hopefully we can improve that in the future.” UNITED manager Jose Mourinho set the tone when he made the sly suggestion, in derby week, that City players go over in a puff of wind.
A few days later former Liverpool star Danny Murphy added a vial of poison to the mix by castigating Swansea players for not hitting Blues players with “a few badlytimed tackles”.
The upshot of this insidious attempt to set an agenda is that Mourinho, who was principally trying to influence the ref for the derby, and Murphy, have got a result two months later.
Leroy Sane will miss some big City games, Kevin de Bruyne has somehow escaped serious injury in a series of wild tackles – the latest by James McClean on Wednesday night – and teenager Brahim Diaz was subjected to a disgusting assault for which perpetrator Matt Phillips received a yellow card.
Neil Warnock’s old-fashioned notion that English football needs a rough edge to it, and Murphy’s assertion that thuggery is not only acceptable but advisable, need to be consigned to the dustbin of history and managers like Mourinho who try to influence refs should be charged.
Getting FIFA to change the rules to snuff out this attitude will be tough – the rest of the world does not need it, because all of those challenges would have brought a straight red card in Spain, Germany... or Timbuktu.
Pep Guardiola has called for more protection for ALL players, not just his City stars, who are clearly being targeted by lesser mortals who cannot cope with them on a football level.
Referees, like the outrageously bad Bobby Madley, are utterly neglecting their duty of care, which should be the top item on every ref’s list of things to do.
When you see a player launch himself off the ground, thigh-high and rake his studs down the length of a player’s legs and deem it a bookable offence, you become an accomplice to the crime rather than the arbiter. So if the referees are failing, what can be done?
First of all, the ridiculous rule that offences which have elicited a yellow card cannot be retrospectively viewed by the FA needs to go.
We now have a farcical situation where a player who spits on an opponent can get a six-match ban in hindsight, and one who dives can similarly find himself in trouble after video review.
Yet West Brom man Matt Phillips, who lunged at Diaz, gets off scotfree. The twisted reasoning behind the idea that a yellowcarded player cannot have his case revisited is that the referee has clearly seen the incident, as he acted on it, and that anything else would undermine the authority of the referee. When the referee’s “authority” is clearly undermined by his own incompetence, it becomes redundant. That particular Pandora’s Box has been bust wide open by video assisted referees, and retrospective