Pep Guardiola: “I don’t take for granted, it’s so difficult [now to play out from the back], before they always allowed you to have two central defenders against a striker, or three against two. Now it’s not possible. It will be the same at Elland Road, man marking. When we played at Newcastle it happened. I saw a few clips of Nottingham Forest with the new manager [Vitor Pereira]. Always it’s happened against Liverpool. That is the reality. Most of the teams play that way. You have to adapt, have an alternative when that happens. An alternative is you have to play quicker up front, if you win that ball it’s a chance. We had an incredible five or six chances against Newcastle where we missed the last pass, when we can run. When the team is brave to go one against one, if you can make some combinations to win that ball you can run. Saying that, it’s not easy because you can make a safer two metre pass than a more difficult thirty metre pass. Always we try to find a way to not just use Erling or a striker in that position. We have to have more variation and unpredictability in our game to drop them and after that make another type of game. It’s like this, defend so high man to man and then defend so, so deep in the box. There are not ‘middle blocks’ and there is not much process to do it for many, many teams. But we are working on it.” 🎥 youtu.be/KnJxkO76098
