Manchester City Players Must No Focus On Liverpool – Pep Guardiola

Pep Guardiola has told his Manchester City players to forget about looking at Liverpool’s matches and focus on winning.

City moved back to within four points of the Premier League leaders after a comfortable 3-0 victory over 10-man Wolverhampton Wanderers on Monday night. The pressure was on his team after Liverpool returned to winning ways on Saturday but Guardiola says his players must forget about looking at where Jurgen Klopp’s side may slip up.

“I don’t have a magic ball to discover when they are going to lose points,” he told a news conference. “I said to [the players] don’t look a the schedule, don’t watch the calendar for the Liverpool games, forget about it.

“Normally when that happens, you lose your own games and you are distracted from what you have to do and lose your games, then it’s over.

“The best way is to look at the next game — Huddersfield, new manager, and what can you do to beat them. If we play and win games but after Liverpool win [the league] then I will congratulate Jurgen and his team because it will be well deserved.

“All we can do is be there, win our games. Today we did it on a Monday and I don’t like to play when everybody has played and you saw the incredible result they had, that’s why I’m very pleased with the game today.”

“We cannot play the games against them, we cannot do anything about their games, the only thing we can do is win our games,” he said. “We’ve spoken to our players, we cannot control what they do, we can only control what we do. Maybe one day they will fail and we will be there. We have to wait and if they fail we’ll be there. If they don’t lose they’ll be champions, that’s why we have to put on pressure by winning our games.

“We’ve done incredible numbers after last season, it’s not easy to maintain this consistency. They are numbers to be champion — it’s no problem but one team has done better so far. All we can do is be there until the end and the results will dictate who will win.”