Manchester City 0-0 Stoke City
Betting websites were counting on Manchester City to make quick work of Stoke and overtake Tottenham at second place. Many thought that the win was inevitable: how could Mark Hughes’s club expect to go against betting odds and players like Sergio Aguero, Kevin De Bruyne and Leroy Sane?
Handicap betting sites were giving the visitors a hefty advantage before the match as Stoke are facing such quality. What transpired during the next 90 minutes left Pep Guardiola, the players and the rest of the Etihad perplexed and.
Aguero, reestablished in the City lineup after a string of top performances, left his shooting boots at home and wasn’t able to threaten Lee Grant at all. The hosts combined for a total of 12 shot attempts, but only one was on target. They weren’t able to make the most out of their dominance on the ball; City held the football for almost two-thirds of the match duration.
The substitutes did well in trying to turn the game around. David Silva and Kelechi Iheanacho tried their best to turn their fortunes around in the second half but their contributions failed to overturn the flow of the match.
Hughes, a former City boss, praised his lads for a battling performance against one of the league’s giants: “Plans and formations and different systems are all well and good, but you need the player to commit to it and that’s what we did to a man tonight. We restricted them to very few opportunities and I don’t think Lee Grant had one save to make in open play, which tells you how well we did on the night. I was really pleased.”
Pep Guardiola was signing a different tune to the press. “It is almost impossible to play the same 11 players,” the Catalan said. “When you have one game a week you can play the same 11 players no problem. We have a lot of games, we have to make a rotation – if not it will be so difficult.”
With Manchester City taking a break this weekend, Guardiola can have more time mulling over what went wrong and implement the necessary adjustments.
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