As a manager who has won both the Bundesliga and the Premier League by 19 points, Pep Guardiola knows something about sizeable gaps. Now he is trying to ignore one.
“It is better not to think that one team is eight points ahead,” he said after defeat to Wolves left Manchester City stranded behind Liverpool in the embryonic title race.
“The distance is big, I know that. It was a bad day. It sometimes happens.” It does not happen often to his side, which exacerbated the sense of surprise after City’s first home defeat of 2019 and their joint heaviest at the Etihad Stadium in his reign.
Perhaps the freakish nature of it was underlined by the reality the sporadically brilliant Adama Traore tripled his tally of Wolves goals in 15 minutes and that, for only the second time in 45 home league games, City failed to score.
Yet Wolves showed such substance to explain why their manager, Nuno Espirito Santo, repeatedly spoke of his pride in his players.
For them, it was a famous win in a fantastic week. If Thursday’s triumph over Besiktas in Turkey represented one of their best ever European results, this was a landmark league victory.
Wolves had not won away at the champions since 1984, or away at City in the top flight since 1979. The scourge of the big six had beaten each of the others last season; now they added City to their list of illustrious victims.
“It was a very good performance and more than that, it was the work,” Nuno said. “The players run like crazy.”
Effort was allied to managerial nous. Nuno merits credit. He removed the profligate Patrick Cutrone, shifted the wing-back Traore into attack and saw one of the division’s quickest players score twice on the break to turn a stalemate into Wolves’ third in in eight days.
The Spaniard had not found the net for 13 months but took his chances with admirable composure.
Both were set up by the selfless, superb Raul Jimenez; they were almost identikit strikes with the Mexican breaking swiftly in the inside-left channel after City lost possession and picking the right pass.
“We had problems on the counter-attack,” Guardiola said. “We were not organised and lost balls in positions we could not lose them in and they were so clinical.”
City had other issues, with their manager saying: “Our process to create chances was not good.”
They looked slower, lacking their natural rhythm and missing the injured Kevin de Bruyne. The closest they came was when David Silva whipped a free kick against the Wolves bar.
It did underline quite what an anomaly City’s previous home league game had been.
En route to conceding eight goals, Watford had been five down after 18 minutes. City only mustered seven shots this time, only two on target.
Rui Patricio had to excel to parry a long-range effort from Raheem Sterling but City could not carve out clear-cut opportunities.
Conor Coady and Willy Boly were defiant in defence for Wolves and the early loss of their injured sidekick, Romain Saiss, proved no problem.
They ought to have led earlier as they served warning of their counter-attacking menace.
Cutrone surged into space but skewed his shot horribly wide. Jimenez, picked out by Riyad Mahrez with a horribly misplaced pass, was denied by a terrific block by the defiant Fernandinho, who excelled again to repel Cutrone’s subsequent shot, despite being on the ground. When Jimenez sprang City’s offside trap, Ederson came out to claim.
Yet City’s subsequent frustrations were summed up when the goalkeeper was booked for dissent, seconds after David Silva had escaped the same punishment for a similar offence.
Guardiola tinkered, sending for Oleksandr Zinchenko at half-time, then rejigging his forward line with first Bernardo Silva and then Gabriel Jesus but defeat left him pondering the fate of defending champions. He said: “Most of the teams who won in the past, the year after, don’t win.”
