Pep Guardiola admitted he made a selection mistake after Manchester City\u2019s 1\u20131 draw with West Ham United, conceding he \u201cdeserved\u201d the criticism for not starting Rayan Cherki. City produced 24 efforts and forced Mads Hermansen into five saves, yet they struggled to create clear openings against a stubborn rearguard.<\/p>\n
Antoine Semenyo, deployed in an unfamiliar central attacking midfield role rather than the centre forward tandem he has often occupied, found chances difficult to come by. It was suggested to Guardiola that Cherki, who was fresh after not starting the midweek Champions League collapse to Real Madrid, would have been better suited to that lock-picking position. \u201cYou are right, yeah. Absolutely. For that role, absolutely. There is no-one better than him,\u201d the manager conceded. Cherki only entered the game for the final half-hour.<\/p>\n
Guardiola did not deflect responsibility. \u201cBad selection,\u201d he sighed, \u201cnow you can criticize me incredibly, for the selection, now I deserve it.\u201d He placed the decision in the context of balance, explaining the risks of fielding certain attacking combinations: \u201cWe learned in the beginning [of the season] that when we played Erling [Haaland] in that moment with J\u00e9r\u00e9my [Doku] or Cherki that we are incredibly unbalanced, we do not have the stability that teams in the Premier League have to have and that is why I try to handle it for that.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s a team that is growing, I think that from the beginning we\u2019ve grown a lot but still it is not finished business. It is like that sometimes but I will not say that I don\u2019t love playing with Rayan, especially when he came from the bench, always the impact is unbelievable.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut sometimes he has not the speed. The team is always stable when Semenyo and Nico O\u2019Reilly play in the winger position and go inside, arrive to the box, they are really, really good. I\u2019m finding still the best way to have stability and consistency in the team.\u201d<\/p>\n
Guardiola contrasted Saturday\u2019s match with City\u2019s 3\u20131 FA Cup victory over Newcastle United a week earlier, and acknowledged that after the 3\u20130 reverse at the Bernab\u00e9u they now face a mountain in both the Champions League and Premier League. That Bernab\u00e9u defeat began with a front-footed 4-2-4 that \u201clargely worked for the first 20 minutes,\u201d until Fede Valverde scored and \u201cEveryone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.\u201d<\/p>\n
With City nine points behind Arsenal, Rodri accepted the gap: \u201cMaybe yes, maybe no,\u201d he said. \u201cWe\u2019re not going to drop hands, we\u2019re going to keep fighting. We know it\u2019s going to be difficult because we have this experience of what you need to win at the end. I think the distance is too far but we\u2019re going to fight until the end.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Guardiola accepted responsibility for benching Rayan Cherki after City drew 1\u20131 with West Ham extra<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":8628,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[238,172],"tags":[1505,1305,1047],"class_list":["post-8629","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-manchester-city","category-epl","tag-accountability","tag-bench-selection","tag-champions-league"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8629","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=8629"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8629\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8628"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8629"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8629"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8629"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}