Man City fought back to win 3-1 after trailing Everton at Goodison Park on Wednesday night
Pep Guardiola shows appreciation to the fans at full-time following the team’s victory in the Premier League match between Everton FC and Manchester City at Goodison Park (Image: Photo by Naomi Baker/Getty Images)
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Manchester City manager Pep Guardiola has revealed that his side were discussing how to combat the threat posed by Sean Dyche’s Everton side while still in mid-air on their way back from lifting the Club World Cup.City secured their fifth piece of major silverware this year when they defeated South American champions Fluminense 4-0 in Jeddah on December 22. Guardiola’s side trailed 1-0 at half-time at Goodison Park but fought back strongly after the break to triumph 3-1.The Spaniard said: “Nothing is easy. Football is like that, life is like that, it’s how you overcome the difficult moments.
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“We’d love for it to be 0-4 after 20 minutes, but this is Disneyland. In the real football it happens like Crystal Palace when we could not win.“These players move. I remember on the plane as we came back from Saudi Arabia, I was there sitting in my seat and I listened to the players and they started to talk about Everton.“Three days ago we started to talk about Everton and I said ‘wow, this is my team.’ They knew how difficult it was with the teams they beat here, the way they play so special, you have to control many things, and we want to be there.“After many years, we still had the feeling that we want to try it again. When you win a lot, the tendency is to go down and we had a lot of problems this season where we played really well in a lot of games but were unable to win.“People say, ‘Manchester City is not the same’ but we lost one game in the last 12 and Aston Villa were miles better than us but in the rest of the games we were better. We were better but we couldn’t win, that’s football, that’s life.“But to still have the desire to focus after being world champions. We don’t talk about ourselves, it’s ‘what’s next?’ and that I like, I like it a lot.”Guardiola celebrated enthusiastically with his players and the Manchester City fans after the final whistle and recognised the significance of the result and performance. He said: “It was really, really important. It was a massive win for us after we came from Saudi Arabia to become world champions.“I’m really pleased given the way we go down, the way we react and prove again how special this group of players are and all the club with the mentality that all of us have in our bones. We want to be there, I know we are not top of the league and there still a lot of games to play and a lot of things are going to happen, teams who are down low or in mid-table can beat everyone so there will be a lot of surprises.“We are really pleased with the victory and the way we played. We conceded a goal when we were playing really good and had key chances.“In the second half, we increased our rhythm and played more direct to the wingers, make a lot of runs and it was really, really good.”
