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WOLVERHAMPTON, England – If Manchester City started this season with questions, they gave some early answers with a 3-1 win over Wolverhampton Wanderers.
Will they be able to remove some of the sloppy performances that they pursued last season? That they have beaten the Wolves, who beat them twice last season, is a positive sign. Can Phil Foden rebound from his English indiscretion to replace David Silva? The young midfielder hid City’s second goal as if he didn’t care about anything in the world.
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More importantly, does Pep Guardiola still have the same fight when he enters a fifth year at the helm of the same club for the first time in his coaching career? The way he celebrated each goal, with fist attacks followed by vigorous applause, suggested he’s not tired of winning yet.
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It should be remembered that on the first weekend of last season, City achieved a 5-0 win at West Ham United and still fell far behind Liverpool. But this was a different test, playing against a formidable Wolves team without the benefit of any kind of preseason, without preparation games and without key players such as Aymeric Laporte, Ilkay Gundogan, Bernardo Silva and Sergio Agüero.
Guardiola was missing seven senior players in total. Ole Gunnar Solskjaer, in particular, highlighted a lack of physical condition when asked to analyze Manchester United’s miserable loss to Crystal Palace at Old Trafford on Saturday. Well, City, which debuted with Nathan Ake and Ferran Torres, also participated in the European competition until mid-August and managed to gather strength to start the campaign with a victory.
At 45 minutes, Guardiola’s men were up 2-0 thanks to Kevin De Bruyne’s penalty and Foden’s tap-in, but it could have been more after they enjoyed almost 70% of the ball, made eight shots and five to door. Tired and pressured in the second half, Guardiola’s team showed resistance that they lacked at times last season, and despite the fact that Raúl Jiménez made it 2-1 in the 78th minute, Gabriel Jesús closed the points in injury time .
“I am very happy with the performance and the way we play, it is one of the most difficult places to play in the Premier League,” Guardiola said afterward.
Last season, City didn’t get going until it was too late. They won their last five games of the season by an aggregate score of 21-1, but by then Liverpool had already collected their medals. If they want to win back the Anfield trophy, the performance at Molineux will have to be repeated over and over again.
Liverpool did not lose a league game until February 29 of last season and consistency is now key in a championship that has not crowned a winner with less than 90 points since 2016. The last three champions have reached at least 98 points and lost a maximum of four. games over the course of a 38-game season. There is no longer any margin for error. If City had lost points here, Guardiola could have found many valid excuses, but it was not necessary.
City have overcome their first hurdle on terrain where last season’s defensive weaknesses were exposed in a 3-2 loss. Guardiola reserved special praise for center-back pair Ake and John Stones – “they were so good,” he said in his post-game press conference – but there are still issues to address and he won’t be happy the Wolves had three good ones. times before Jiménez found the net behind a Daniel Podence cross.
But a dangerous game, played in less than ideal circumstances, has been safely negotiated. After such a short break this summer, the price, according to Guardiola, is that the team chosen to play Bournemouth in the Carabao Cup on Thursday will be “mostly academy players” while their biggest stars rest.
“We won the Carabao Cup three times in a row and we would like to continue but we do not have the players, in this period, to play every three days,” he said. “It was very difficult. It is a good victory for us. We cannot pretend that we can recover in three days and then play again in another three.”
The priority is the league and regain your title.
Source: espn.co.uk
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