Pep Guardiola expects to face a more threatening Atletico side in Madrid when Manchester City look to book their place in the Champions League quarter-finals.
Diego Simeone lined his team up in two banks of five close to goalkeeper Jan Oblak as they rigidly attempted to neutralise City's goal threat. It worked for the first half, but Phil Foden found Kevin De Bruyne to make the breakthrough in the 70th minute to give the Blues a crucial advantage to take to the Spanish capital next week.
That goal opened the game up a bit more for the last 20 minutes as Atletico looked for a way to get back into the match. While Guardiola would never assume publicly how another team will line up he suggested that the second leg in Madrid could be less cagey than the majority of the game in Manchester.
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"I don’t judge what they do because I don’t know. It is more the fact that it was one game with 0-0 and at 1-0 it was a bit different," he said. "I guess the high part of the game will be more what happened in the last 15-20 minutes after the goal. This is my feeling.
"We have to prepare and adapt for both sides but now of course we have five days to prepare a Premier League game and after what we can do to attack a bit better and go there to not defend the result and try and win the game.
It was a difficult game against a tough opponent, during 25-30 minutes they played 5-5-0 and it was so difficult to find the spaces. We were patient enough except the first 5-10 minutes of the second half, like we did not attack in the right rhythm.
"The way we play is the way we play. It was a good result, unfortunately at the end we had one or two more chances with Kevin to score more goals but 1-0 to go to Madrid is good."
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