Pep Guardiola believes Manchester City cannot beat Manchester United 5-0 on Saturday at Old Trafford as Liverpool did a fortnight ago because football is not “copy paste”.
United have not played at home since the rout by Jürgen Klopp’s side in which Mohamed Salah scored a hat-trick. Guardiola was asked what he and his staff had learned regarding how to set up against United from analysing the match.
“We do not have the quality to play like Liverpool play so we play a different way,” the manager said. “Football is not ‘copy paste’. After this defeat they changed the setup [to 3-5-2] against Tottenham and it worked, and kept it against Atalanta, but after they got an injury to Raphaël Varane they changed back to a four. We will see on Saturday what they will do.”
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Given City are the champions and have an array of high-class attackers including Phil Foden, Kevin De Bruyne and Jack Grealish, Guardiola was pressed on why he says his team cannot do what Liverpool did. “If you want to do it like Liverpool you want Jürgen Klopp, [Sadio] Mané and Salah to come,” he said. “We cannot play like they play because we have different players and different ways to play. If you see in the last four, five or six years in the Premier League, looking at the games played by Liverpool and City you know we play differently.
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“We are going to try to do our game as a team but we have different qualities in a different way. Maybe right now if United played Liverpool they would play in a different way and it would not be the same result as last time because everyone learns in football.”
Guardiola is wary of United’s propensity to score goals in added time, which has been dubbed Fergie time because of how often it happened under Sir Alex Ferguson. “We must be ready,” he said, before joking: “I’m pretty sure they’ll call Sir Alex for the Fergie time.” Kyle Walker is an injury doubt owing to a foot problem.
