Manchester City confirmed Pep Guardiola did not take the prematch press conference ahead of Sunday\u2019s fixture with Tottenham Hotspur because of a “personal reason.” The manager had been present and upbeat during a midweek debrief, where he said he would call Jos\u00e9 Mourinho to thank him for defeating Real Madrid with Benfica and securing City\u2019s passage to the round of 16.<\/p>\n
On Thursday evening Guardiola spoke at a charity concert in Barcelona, describing his remarks as “a statement for Palestine and … a statement for humanity” and addressing the audience with: “Good evening, salam alaikum, how wonderful,” before speaking of children caught in the conflict: “When I see a child in these past two years with these images on social media, on television, recording himself, pleading, \u2018Where is my mother?\u2019 among the rubble and he still doesn\u2019t know it. ]”<\/p>\n
Assistant coach John Lijnders confirmed that Guardiola “will arrive back here in Manchester” on Friday, allowing time for travel to the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium ahead of the Sunday game.<\/p>\n
Tottenham\u2019s ground has been a difficult venue for Guardiola. City\u2019s trips to N17 have followed a recurring pattern: sustained pressure from City met by Spurs\u2019 resilience and swift, clinical transitions. City failed to score with their first 101 shots at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium until Nathan Ak\u00e9 bundled one in the 88th minute of the 2024 FA Cup fourth round tie between the clubs.<\/p>\n
Across nine matches in N17, City have faced five managers, recorded three wins, zero draws and six defeats, scored three goals and registered 137 shots. Recent visits have brought slightly better returns, but Thomas Frank\u2019s current Tottenham have already beaten the Sky Blues this season. Guardiola has reflected on the difficulty at the venue more than once: “Many times it happened we played really good, many, many times, we were not able to score and win the games.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Guardiola missed the Tottenham prematch press conference after a Barcelona charity talk. Travel back<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":6346,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[238,187],"tags":[1162,1047,1138],"class_list":["post-6347","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-manchester-city","category-tottenham-hotspur","tag-analytics","tag-champions-league","tag-charity-match"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6347","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=6347"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6347\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6346"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6347"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6347"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6347"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}