What Pep Guardiola said about Everton after the FA Cup win shows Carlo Ancelotti’s next challenge

Everton’s challenge is to make Pep Guardiola change his tone.

He likes blues too much. He’s too complimentary about the team’s players, tactics, and their commitment.

Everton need to start getting under his skin. Do it and the Blues will know that you consider them a real threat.

But for now, it’s easy for Guardiola to dish out the compliments.

In trying to calm damaged pride and finding the prospect of losing the FA Cup quarter-finals to the best team in the country, his words are helpful and give Carlo Ancelotti’s team the level of credit they deserve.

Guardiola, you could say, always has class in this sense.

But the truth is that we want Guardiola to stop thinking so much about Everton.

He’s a huge loser, all the biggest winners in the sport, but far too often, and too much for anyone’s liking, he’s in the position to be a good winner when it comes to Everton.

City have a roster of world-class footballers and the difference between the teams is significant, but that doesn’t mean that no one at Goodison Park should accept another loss and the kind words of their coach.

You see, the Manchester City boss is never short of kind words about the Blues, but they’ve had his back for a long time. That he was less inclined to talk to them before and after games.

This is what he said after this game.

“… a real, tough and tough game. We knew it. We watched their warm-up and you could see the commitment and how focused they were.

“They defended very aggressively, in a good way, winning matches… Richarlison and Calvert-Lewin are so strong. Every pitch is a corner. Really very hard.

“One of the toughest games we have played this year. From the last international break to this international break ”.

On the one hand, the compliments are something Everton should take advantage of from this loss. The Blues have to find the positives in the rubble of another failed FA Cup campaign.

But on the other hand, Everton should be sick and tired of listening to it. Compliments are actually hollow words. A friendly assessment, yes, but from a coach who knows that his team can always surpass those qualities that he talks about in the Blues.

Guardiola says the Blues played well, but the result was the same.

Look, he’s right in what he says. Everton were aggressive, focused, intense and determined not only to accept that the odds were very against them and to let events take their natural course.

No. They made life incredibly difficult for City and they deserve credit for doing it because so many other parties haven’t even done it.

But if City hadn’t found a way, and if Everton had scored a goal and continued to defend as stoically as they had, do you think Guardiola would have been so magnanimous after this?

Would the compliments have been flowing if the Blues had pushed their team out of the FA Cup? No possibility.

Put it this way, it didn’t exactly get the Blues praising when they made four shots on goal and won 4-0 here in 2017, did it?

But that’s because Everton had inflicted a punishing defeat on him and his team. They weren’t just a team that could compete and make life difficult for City, but one that could punish them.

Draw 1-1 at the start of next season, and Everton thwarted him again.

You wouldn’t expect Guardiola to lavish praise on the Blues after those games, but that’s the point, right?

And since then, City have won all seven games between the two sides.

Not surprisingly, Pep paid this compliment to Gylfi Sigurdsson, Yerry Mina and Dominic Calvert-Lewin and of course Ancelotti.

But while Sigurdsson did more than his fair share of defensive work today, the “master” at set pieces didn’t deliver one that City didn’t deal with.

And yes, Mina was “strong” as Guardiola says and, in general, she played a very good game, but she was also left out for City’s second goal.

Calvert-Lewin is also “one of the best” in the air, Pep said previously, and he’s right, but how many times did Everton give him a cross to prove it here?

It is not about taking away all the good that Everton showed in this tie, but to highlight that Guardiola can continue to praise the team because he knows that his team can, and will find, a way to stop them.

The task is to put that doubt and concern in your mind.

No one is saying that they do not mean what they say, this is not an accusation that it is false, it is just that their words are a by-product of the gap that exists.

Or, more specifically, that Guardiola is clearly not that restless for Everton because his team keeps winning these games.

He said it would have been “impossible” for his team to have come back 1-0 tonight against the Blues.

City, with Kevin De Bruyne, Riyad Mahrez and Sergio Agüero on the bench, would you still not have imagined getting the tie?

Even against such a tough team, and in the mood for Everton tonight? Even with the Blues’ track record of protecting leads this season?

Ok, maybe this time around, he was being a bit untrue, but maybe he said it to highlight how well his players had done in overcoming the challenge that Everton presented to them.

As Ancelotti later said, City are the best team in the world and their players had pushed, pushed and held them for more than 80 minutes, before their resistance gave way.

Before Ilkay Gundogan reacted faster to hit a ball that had bounced off the crossbar, Guardiola had no happy thoughts about Everton.

For long stretches, he looked stressed, agitated and worried as this quarterfinal tie had turned into exactly what he didn’t want it to be: a fight.

And the Blues, while struggling to create clear opportunities, were doing so well as to restrict visitors to equally few opportunities.

It had been more than an hour and the visitors had made only two shots on goal and hardly bothered the Blues.

One of the two saves Joao Virginia, 21, had made so far was essentially to catch a speculative effort by Raheem Sterling.

The other was to angle Sterling’s worn effort around the post. But the excellent save was the exception to the rule at the time.

And although Guardiola would later say that Everton were aggressive in a “good way”, you can’t be so sure that he would have been so understanding if they had lost, da Gundogan and Phil Foden complained to the referee and needed treatment, after challenges from the midfield of the Blues.

Everton were aggressive and generally fair. They boarded hard. They sometimes committed fouls that deserved the warnings given, but there is no doubt that they destabilized some of the City’s most creative players for long periods by putting pressure on them.

Exactly as they should, exactly as Ancelotti will have instructed them also because that abyss of quality that exists needed to be reduced with organization, set pieces, counterattacks and, being in the face and back.

A full house at Goodison would have loved it. Guardiola affirmed that he also liked it. But that’s because he won the game.

It’s time to be less complimentary.