Burnley 1 Manchester City 0: Barcelona will not play like Burnley – just as well for Manuel Pellegrini
Pellegrini launches familiar defence of his players, who have now taken 16 points from their last 11 Premier League matches
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Manuel Pellegrini does not strike you as the kind of man to pin up newsprint on dressing-room walls. In football his reputation is as an engineer rather than a showman. However, if Manchester City’s manager had flicked through the Spanish press just before Barcelona came to the Etihad Stadium for the first leg of their Champions League encounter, he would have found page after page examining their 1-0 defeat at home to his former club, Malaga.
The cries were that Barça’s title challenge had been blown. The photograph, used everywhere, was of Lionel Messi on his knees. Barcelona settled the contest at the Etihad before the interval.
In the aftermath of the 1-0 defeat at Burnley which appeared to wreck whatever hopes City might have had of retaining their title, Pellegrini launched a familiar defence of his players, who have now taken 16 points from their last 11 Premier League matches, while the same number of games has yielded Arsenal 27 points.
City, said Pellegrini, had enjoyed 70 per cent of possession; they had more shots on target. He described their performance as “normal” rather than the “dreadful” it appeared to the 4,000 who packed one end of Turf Moor.
However, when he argued that this display would have little impact on how City will perform in the Nou Camp on Wednesday, he was probably right. While Barcelona were being beaten by Malaga, City were massacring Newcastle. It made no difference.
“It is always the case just before a big game that maybe minds are not completely on this game,” Pellegrini said, suggesting this was a match that might have been played in the mental shadow of the Nou Camp.
“Maybe we did it well before the first leg when we played Newcastle. Here, I don’t know why we couldn’t create the space because we had a lot of creative players, we had three or four chances and I don’t think we deserved to lose.”
They did lose, taking their tally of points dropped to Burnley to five, one for every million pounds Sean Dyche’s side cost to assemble.
Pellegrini said, probably truthfully, that this was not his worst moment at City, arguing that being beaten by Wigan in the quarter-finals of the FA Cup, followed by elimination from the Champions League at the Nou Camp had been harder to take. Then, Manchester City recovered to steal a title that ought to have been Liverpool’s.
The teams that Jose Mourinho fashions are not the stumbling type and, from his seat at Turf Moor, City’s director of football, Txiki Begiristain, might have wondered why the players that had been bought on Pellegrini’s watch – Eliaquim Mangala, Wilfried Bony and Bacary Sagna – were all on the bench.
City might be a happier club since Roberto Mancini departed, they might be one that spends its oil money less ostentatiously, but Pellegrini is still overwhelmingly reliant on the footballers he inherited and now Yaya Touré, Edin Dzeko and David Silva – all of whom were subbed at Burnley – are two years older.
“Of course when you don’t have the victories you should have had, there are problems,” said Pellegrini. “But there are moments in football when you must know how to get results.”
That was roughly the message Dyche had given his players before kick-off. The Burnley manager has tired of plaudits he has earned in defeat and for this match he selected three strikers.
“The bigger teams have world-class players who can cut you open in a second,” said George Boyd, whose volley just past the hour ripped this match open. “But if you get in among them and press them, they don’t really like it because they are not used to it. I think you saw recently at Liverpool that they don’t track back as well as they go forward. We knew we could exploit that and we did. You saw how Liverpool got behind them and we did here. Getting in their faces got us the win.”
After Burnley’s 2-0 defeat at Liverpool 10 days earlier in the month, Dyche made some pointed comments about how relegation would be a financial catastrophe for some clubs in a way it would not be for Burnley.
Then, he was probably thinking of Aston Villa but now the target must be a Sunderland side that appears to be in an advanced stage of disintegration, led by a manager who seems bankrupt of ideas.
“We have had the pressure all season,” said Boyd, who described the strike that beat England goalkeeper Joe Hart as “the best, the most important goal of my career”. He added: “Nobody expects us to stay in this division so we don’t have the massive pressure that is on Villa or Sunderland.”
He and Pellegrini did agree on two things. Firstly, that it had been a beautiful goal and secondly that this result will not matter in the Nou Camp.
“Barcelona,” said Boyd, “are not going to play like Burnley.”
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