Pep Guardiola acknowledged he “suffered” through Manchester City’s defensive display in the draw with Arsenal but defended the decision to prioritise resilience after a demanding week. City took the lead through Erling Haaland’s early strike before the team withdrew into a defence-first shape, only for Gabriel Martinelli to level deep into added time.<\/p>\n
The match featured an unusual tactical switch. City finished with just 32.8% possession, their lowest-ever return under Guardiola, after pivoting to a 5-4-1 formation that even saw Haaland sacrificed for defensive midfielder Nico Gonz\u00e1lez. The plan was clear: frustrate Arsenal and protect a narrow lead.<\/p>\n
Asked about the setup, Guardiola stressed the importance of attitude and recovery. “It\u2019s the body language\u2014how we celebrate, how we communicate, how we make an effort,” he said. “We lost it a lot last season.<\/p>\n
“I said, \u2018I don\u2019t give a f— about the results, I want to see the spirit back in the training sessions and us enjoying it\u2019. We had to recover it. This week we have recovered. We have to continue.<\/p>\n
“I suffered. I don\u2019t like it, I want the ball far away [from goal]. But once in 10 years is OK, right? Our resilience was fantastic, otherwise we cannot survive.”<\/p>\n
Arsenal midfielder Declan Rice described the change as unexpected. “Seeing the end, they changed to a back five, went to five, which I\u2019ve never seen them do, and they\u2019re obviously trying to hang on, so obviously to get them with a draw at the end was good for us.”<\/p>\n
Guardiola was clear he does not intend to reshape City into a counter-attacking side, but said the approach has been used before when circumstances demand it. “We try not to be like this but when the opponent is better and we have Erling who can run with such power, we have to do this,” he stressed. “Remember how many counter attacks we scored with Leroy [San\u00e9], Raheem [Sterling] and Kevin [De Bruyne]? I would prefer not to do it but I would expect in this level we have to do it.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Guardiola defended City’s switch to a defence-first plan after the draw, citing recovery of spirit..<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2987,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[192,238,969],"tags":[253],"class_list":["post-2988","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-arsenal","category-manchester-city","category-premier-league","tag-declan-rice"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2988","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2988"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2988\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2987"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2988"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2988"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2988"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}