Manchester City were big favourites against Seria A side, who started their season bad, taking just one point in three opening games in Italian league.
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The National’s Sport cover for the Wednesday, September 16 issue, featuring Manchester City as they slipped against Juventus in the Champions League.
“I don’t think we need to learn from other years”, said the Chilean, whose team lost 3-1 to Bayern Munich in their first group game in 2013 and drew 1-1 with Roma last season. We had better chances and played better than Juventus.
And last year’s Champions League finalists completed their smash-and-grab raid at Eastlands when Morata drilled home a shot past Hart and into the corner of the goal after reacting first to Cuadrado’s miscontrolled touch on the edge of the area.
Everything has fallen into place so neatly for Manchester City early this season that there was a question for their captain, Vincent Kompany, in the padded leather seats of their training ground yesterday, about whether Chelsea could be considered a threat any more.
He was afforded two attempts on goal from range and though neither were on target and thus didn’t trouble Juventus goalkeeper Gianluigi Buffon, they were still respectable efforts. “I don’t think he showed us any respect at all, to be honest”.
Manuel Pellegrini’s side have swept all before them in the Premier League with five successive wins and no goals conceded so far this season. But they were exposed defensively by the Italians, who came out of their defensive shell and scored twice to grab a crucial win in Group D. Maybe Juventus didn’t create so many chances but they had a strong finish. It was not a panic game and we didn’t have the feeling that we didn’t know what to do.
Belgian defender Kompany picked up a calf injury in the midweek Champions League defeat at home to Juventus and will also miss Tuesday’s Capital One Cup game at Sunderland. “He never ceases to amaze us”.
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“We allowed City very little and the goal came from an incident where we shouldn’t have given the ball away”.
