Pellegrini, 62, arrived at City from Malaga back in the summer of 2013, and won the Premier League in his first season in charge, pipping Liverpool to top spot.
Advertisement
MANCHESTER – Manchester City’s participation in next season’s Champions League is in doubt after they drew 2-2 with Arsenal on Sunday, to give Manchester United the chance to overtake them.
Manchester City players only have themselves to blame if they miss out on Champions League football next season, according to Bacary Sagna. “Of course we’re not flawless, of course we could have done better but for me we deserve to be in the Champions League”, he stated. “We should have won that game, and I think we deserved it. We played very well”.
Pellegrini, however, called on his side to put their best foot forward in their final league match.
“The only thing that we couldn’t be the best at is our defence – that was Chelsea, they conceded just four fewer goals than our team – but the goal difference is huge between us and all the other teams”.
Italian website TuttoMercatoWeb claims that Jose Mourinho wants to bring Ozil in from arch-rivals Arsenal if he gets the manager’s job at the end of the season. We need to think like a big club. There’s nothing to be gained for simply making it to the Europa League final-no prize of, say, a Europa League berth for making it this far-which means that if Liverpool don’t win, they could end up out of Europe entirely next season.
City finishes the season away to Swansea.
“The third thing is that in the whole season we were always in the Champions League spots and the fourth thing is that it was a very hard season, especially in January and February when we were involved in four competitions”.
Sagna also expressed regret that City were unable to secure victory in Pellegrini’s final match in charge at the Etihad Stadium, with the Chilean left to conduct a barely audible speech in front of a sparse collection of fans who remained from a capacity crowd for a post-match lap of honour.
Fans voted with their feet last weekend by streaming out of the stadium and refusing to hang around for the squad’s lap of honour.
Wenger was optimistic about his team’s resilient display, equalising twice to earn a point at the Etihad and keeping the gap between the two teams at three points.
Advertisement
City failed to register a single shot on target in their meek 1-0 Champions League semi-final defeat at Real Madrid, but after a sprightly start they went ahead in the eighth minute.
