Pep Guardiola paid tribute to his captain, Vincent Kompany, after Manchester City’s biggest league win of the season, not for completing a fifth successive game but for popping up with an important goal at the start of the second half of the 5-0 win against Crystal Palace.
“We don’t score enough goals,” the City manager said. “The numbers don’t lie, we have not been good enough in the boxes this season. If we had been only one goal in front with 20 minutes to go in this game we would not have won, so I said to the players at half-time either score a goal or forget about it. Going ahead in the first minutes of the game helped us a lot but we still needed a second and Vincent scored an amazing goal. After that we were able to play without pressure.”
By the end of the match Kompany’s centre-back partner, Nicolás Otamendi, had joined him on the scoresheet as City shared the goals around, something they have not been doing enough this season for Guardiola’s liking. But he did make the claim that City are the Premier League’s best side at creating chances.
“Apart from one game, at White Hart Lane, I cannot remember a match where we did not create more chances than the other side,” Guardiola claimed. “The others, no chance. So we are better than all the teams in the Premier League, home and away.
“Even the next champions, Chelsea, we create more chances here [at the Etihad Stadium] than even at Stamford Bridge, but in the boxes we are not good. We are the best in the league at doing that, we create more chances than anyone, but we are not always able to score the goals. In basketball you see Michael Jordan, last minute ... puts it in the net.
“Vincent helped us with his presence in the box and the win was important because we play for the future of the club. The most difficult thing in football, basketball, tennis, in all the sports is to do it in the last moment. That’s why we are in the situation we are in.
“The Premier League is tough, four big teams fighting for two places. Hopefully United can focus on the Europa League and we can have five English teams in the Champions League next season. That would be amazing.”
Sam Allardyce knows all about how tough the Premier League is. After felling Arsenal, Chelsea and Liverpool last month, three straight defeats have brought Palace back into the relegation equation. “We don’t want to be asking for anyone’s help,” Allardyce said. “We need a result against Hull next week and we need to get back to keeping clean sheets. It is our last home game of the season and I want to see ‘Hull City nil’.”
