‘Proud’ Pep Guardiola defends Erling Haaland as City’s miserable run continues

Manchester City boss Pep Guardiola felt a huge sense of “pride” after his side suffered their latest defeat at the hands of Aston Villa.

Villa opened the scoring after 16 minutes when Youri Tielemans’ sublime pass set Morgan Rogers on his way who squared for Jhon Duran to score his third in three matches.

Rogers netted his fifth goal of the season midway through the second half to put Villa two goals ahead and City’s response came too late after Phil Foden took advantage of Lucas Digne’s slip to finish things off with not enough time left to push for an equaliser.

Guardiola refused to point the finger at his players following the 2-1 loss – their sixth defeat in their last eight games.

He said: “Thanks to some players today, the pride they showed on the pitch again.

“It happens since three months ago, nothing has changed. I have to deal with that. This is not an easy place to come, last season in the Premier League we didn’t win here.

“I take the positive things from here, reflect and the same with the players. What I see them doing before and after, how they behave and I feel pride, thinking let’s go, onto the next one.

“It’s over, this is one, we will recover, see how many players can play the next game against Everton and try to do it.

“I never point in nine years and never will point at players, it will be easy for me to say that and completely wrong because they play, when I said drop in the second half, we dropped as a team. We were not like the first half.

“Not for any particular player. I’ll never say this, they tried, and they want to do it and have to find a solution and balance to create more chances and score goals and not concede.”

Erling Haaland was hugely frustrated throughout the contest once again and has now scored just one in his last six league games but Guardiola stuck up for his talisman.

He added: “Without him (Haaland) we will be even worse.

“But I like how the players feel this way. This is our only chance we have to get better.

“We tried and at the end he needs to be delivered the right balls in the right spots and position but now we will fight for the next one.”

Unai Emery insists he sensed a drop in confidence from City which allowed them to claim a third win in four.

He said: “Progressively, the mentality and confidence was increasing and theirs was going down, and it was fantastic how the players responded on the field.

“The first half we didn’t work completely because we were defending so low. In the second half we were getting more in the attacking third and the consequences we scored and the confidence increased more. Defensively we did a fantastic working 90 minutes.

“Manchester City are a little bit under the confidence they had normally.

“The second half was different, we dominated and we scored. Through those circumstances they were feeling worse than even in the first half.”