A late goal from Iheanacho took Manchester City to the top of the Premier League table, as the Citizens beat Swansea City 2-1 at the Etihad Stadium.
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Substitute Bafetimbi Gomis looked to have salvaged a point for the hard-working Swans with a ferocious strike in the 89th minute but they were deflated when Yaya Toure’s last-gasp effort caught Iheanacho and looped in.
Despite fielding a £74million centre-back partnership of Eliaquim Mangala and Nicolas Otamendi, City again failed to keep a clean sheet without Vincent Kompany. “I thought we deserved something out of the game”.
“Maybe Swansea played better than our team today, but we played two times better than West Ham here when we had 18 or 20 chances to score and we couldn’t win”.
City’s title credentials were severely questioned after a lacklustre 2-0 loss at Stoke last weekend, but Pellegrini was encouraged by the way his players overcame their inconsistent display against Swansea and found a way to grind out the victory.
Pellegrini said: “Always when a club change a manager they have a special motivation in the first game, but that is always a different thing, I think they can not change too much in two or three days”. “Obviously it’s an important three points for us”. We were not 100 per cent recovered from the Champions League game against Borussia Monchengladbach on Tuesday. “We probably did create more chances than City, that’s the difference between the teams at top of the league and at the bottom”.
Indeed, Swansea have now won only one of their last eight away outings in the Premier League (W1 D2 L5) and face a City side who have won 13 of their last 15home fixtures in the competition. “David and Kevin De Bruyne were in doubt until yesterday [Friday]”.
“It’s a matter of belief, if you believe in the manager or not”, said the Dutchman, who said Friday that United had to get used to no longer being one of Europe’s superpowers after its elimination from the Champions League this week.
Playing their first match since the departure of Garry Monk, the manager who left on Wednesday after a miserable run of form in which they had claimed just one win in 11 league matches, Swansea produced a battling performance worthy of at least a point. “We need every point we can and we will strive to be competitive and get something out of a hard game”.
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United could have gone level with new Premier League leaders Manchester City, but their third defeat of the campaign left them three points off the pace in fourth and at risk of falling six points behind Leicester City, who host Chelsea on Monday, generating yet more bad press for the floundering Van Gaal.
