Pep Guardiola admits Manchester City “have a lot of problems” heading into Sunday’s Manchester derby.
A dreadful run for City – a set of results unprecedented in Guardiola’s glittering managerial career – continued on Wednesday night following the 2-0 defeat at Juventus in the Champions League.
The Premier League champions have now won only one of their last 10 games and host Manchester United on Sunday in another game.
Dusan Vlahovic opened the scoring in Turin before Weston McKennie added a second to leave City 22nd in the Champions League table.
Guardiola suggested the injury crisis his team have endured this season cannot be ignored, while he did praise his team for their performance.
“There are many reasons. We have a lot of problems,” he said.
“When you play without three central defenders and two holding midfielders, the structure in the middle doesn’t have the stability. It’s really, really tough. The team we played was really, really good. It’s Juventus in Turin, a strong team who is very good in transition and set pieces. Congratulate them. The results, of course, we miss something. We have to insist on our strength as a team will bring us a place where we’ve been in the last decade
Ilkay Gundogan had revealed in his post-match interview that he believes City are lacking confidence and their tendency to over-complicate matters on the pitch is having an impact on their poor form.
“It’s a big part of it and obviously that's a mental issue as well,” said the German.
“You can see that. We sometimes, one action we miss the ball, lose a duel and you see that we drop immediately, lose the rhythm, they are able to break our rhythm with the easiest of things. They don't even need to do much
"You have to do the simple things as good as possible. Work hard again, this is how you get confidence back, even in the game if you miss something, by doing small and simple things you get confidence back at the moment we are always doing the wrong things.
"I feel like we know exactly what's going wrong. If you look at the most part of games even today we actually didn’t play bad, created chances, just missed to score, in these kind of games if you give away once chance it's not easy to bounce back.”
When those comments were put to Guardiola, he said: “No, no we have done it today [play well].
“Today we have done really well, didn't lose many balls like in the past, we tried, we arrived in the positions.
“Against Italian teams, defend so deep, so compact. Master of these kind of situations. We play who we are and we missed the result but the performance is there."
