Manchester City manager Pep Guardiola
Manchester City manager Pep Guardiola (Image: David Ramos - UEFA/UEFA via Getty Images)
Press conferences come thick and fast when a team plays as often as Manchester City do, so it took some time to work out when Pep Guardiola had last categorised their problems.
It turned out it was a recently as four days ago, when he was asked before the Feyenoord match if they would need a lengthy winning run to have success this season. "Just one," he replied. "You have to win one. Are we ready to win the Premier League? No, we have to win one game and after win the next one and learn from this one to get better."
That reflected where City were, on their worst ever losing streak but still backed to turn things around. Feyenoord was only one more game, yet the manner of the late collapse appears to have changed something substantial for the manager. It was appropriate on Friday that Guardiola challenged the term that City were in crisis...and then went on to immediately describe a situation that cannot feel like anything else.
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"The result won't change anything. The mood would be better but after three days against Nottingham Forest if you are not stable it's not going to happen," he said. "You are stable when you are winning 10 or 12 games in a row, like we have done as many years. One game now is not going to change the feeling of how we are as a team.
"All I would ask is no the result but the players back. I just ask the players back to have the team that we created at the beginning of the season to go everywhere to be who we are. From the beginning of the season we could not do that. That is the situation that we had. When people ask me what I want, win games? Yeah but if we don't have the players sooner or later we're going to fall down again."
When even a win at Liverpool - the league leaders and a team who have a tremendous record at home to City - won't change anything, that's when you know things are bad. And Guardiola knows things are and will keep being bad because he knows how long players are out for and has enough evidence for how the team have struggled without those players.
It is about Rodri but it is also about defensive stability, midfield cohesion, creativity and attacking; it's like the David Moyes comment recast in Guardiola's version of a City nightmare. It does sound like an excuse but until the injury situation improves Guardiola cannot see his team being stable.
For any manager to not know where their next wins are coming from is difficult, and for a City manager who has won six of the last seven Premier League titles it most definitely constitutes a crisis. A victory against Liverpool will get City out of their winless streak, but it now sounds as though it will take much longer for them to get out of trouble.
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