Manuel Pellegrini blamed Manchester City’s long injury list and the hectic fixture schedule his fit players are having to negotiate for Stoke City’s 2-0 humiliation of his team – but Joe Hart called it correctly when the goalkeeper said his side’s performance had been unacceptable.
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Manchester City didn’t learn from this either and were again watching Shaqiri’s magic tear them apart in the 15th minute, his flawless through ball picking out his Austrian teammate for his second goal of the day.
However, they have reached the semi-finals of the League Cup and the last 16 of the Champions League, with their last group game against Borussia Monchengladbach coming up on Tuesday.
Playing expansive football at times, Stoke handled the windy conditions better and could easily have won by a bigger margin. City are now relying heavily on home games to get the points as Pellegrini will want to sort out his side’s issues as soon as possible.
“So I am not concerned that we didn’t bring in another player because we have Kelechi and we also have Sterling who can play as a central striker”.
As City dropped to third, Arsenal went to second – two points behind Leicester – by halting a three-game winless run with a 3-1 victory over Sunderland that saw Olivier Giroud score for both teams.
It was a memorable day for the enigmatic Arnautovic, who would have claimed a four-goal haul in the first period had his header hit the other side of the net and his one-on-one hat-trick chance not struck the post.
Stoke manager Mark Hughes dropped Jon Walters to the bench, choosing to combine the creative gifts of Ibrahim Afellay, Bojan Krkic and Xherdan Shaqiri with Arnautovic, a switch that paid off. Each and every one of them put in a high-level performance and as a effect of that we were able to win against the team top of the pile.
“I’ve been close to doing it but today it worked flawless for us”.
“We went with something different today, pushing Bojan up front”. “We are the only team playing in all the competitions and playing with 13 players in all competitions”. We couldn’t attack or defend.
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“I am concerned about the two goals that we conceded and I am concerned about the few chances that we created”.
