PEP: WE MAY BREAK BANK TO GET HAALAND
Guardiola says City could break bank to improve team long-term
BACK in August, when Manchester City blew their last Champions League quarter-final, against Lyon, Phil Foden was a frustrated spectator from the bench.
Pep Guardiola plumped for three at the back in that game, and neither Foden nor David Silva, seriously affecting their creativity in the final third.
This time, with Borussia Dortmund lying in wait over two legs, Foden is poised to play an important role.
Rested at the weekend after impressing for England, it is highly likely he starts against the Bundesliga outfit - a sure sign that his transformation from promising fringe player to key man is as good as complete.
Pep Guardiola insisted his team played well when they crashed out to Lyon who, like Dortmund, were at the end of an underwhelming league season and were strict underdogs.
But the sense that City’s belief in them- selves deserts them at crucial moments in big European games seemed to haunt them, regardless of the fact that they should have had a free-kick leading up to the second Lyon goal.
Everything about City this season oozes selfbelief, but they still falter when they go behind in games - that is something they are likely to face in this season’s competition, and need to conquer.
Side-stepping the obvious Easter puns, Gabriel Jesus could be one of the players who survives Guardiola’s usual pattern of six or seven player changes, after his bright, goalscoring display at Leicester.
He was pivotal when the Blues beat Real Madrid last season, earning man of the match honours in both legs, a sign that he thrives on the big-game challenge.
He is also the perfect threat to a Dortmund defence which has been nervy and uncertain this season. With such a full squad, Guardiola has slipped comfortably into a system of changing most of his team, every three or four days.
And the size of the Blues’ lead in the Premier League means he can field a ‘weaker’ team at weekends and still beat the third-best team in the country this season.
That means Joao Cancelo, John Stones, Ilkay Gundogan, Bernardo Silva, Phil Foden, and Raheem Sterling are all champing at the bit and rested.
And Guardiola knows he can take out six or seven again next weekend, against Leeds, and still have a team capable of controlling and winning the game.
City have already broken a Champions League record this season, by conceding just one goal in reaching the quarter-finals - a run of eight matches.
No other team in the competition’s history can match such meanness in the current format of the competition.
AC Milan conceded just one in their first ten games in 1992-93, but that was in an unusual format where the bigger clubs faced minnows in qualifying games - so they clocked up clean sheets in twolegged knockouts against Olimpija Ljubljana and Slovan
Bratislava before conceding once, like City, in the group stage against Porto, PSV Eindhoven and Gothenburg.
That propelled them straight into the final, where the second goal they conceded in the tournament saw them lose to Marseille.