Pep Guardiola brushed off claims from Liverpool and Chelsea that Covid-19 has had a major impact on the title race as he aims to bring Manchester City’s title dream a step closer.
Pep Guardiola said “If they believe it’s the reason why then maybe,” he said. “Maybe. Sometimes it’s the money that we have, sometimes it’s Covid. I don’t know. Maybe. We had injuries, we had Covid. Maybe we don’t say which players — out of respect [to those players] the club don’t do it — but we had a lot of players and backroom staff with Covid and at the beginning of the season we had a lot of tough injuries with our players. So what can I say? If they believe we were lucky, okay we were lucky. Thank you.”
City can move 13 points clear of Chelsea if they beat them at Etihad in the Saturday lunchtime game. Liverpool, 11 points behind with a game in hand, take on Brentford on Sunday. Having started December a point behind Chelsea and one ahead of Liverpool, the reigning champions produced a flawless December by winning all seven of their games while their rivals floundered to open up a 10-point gap at the top of the table. Such a swing in so short a period of time has deflated neutrals who were hoping for an exciting title race, and has also punctured the optimism of the chasing clubs. Liverpool centre-back Virgil van Dijk last week bemoaned that City had had ‘few injuries and few corona cases’ in December in contrast to the Anfield side missing him, Thiago Alcantara and Fabinho at the same time. And Thomas Tuchel used his press conference ahead of Chelsea’s trip to the Etihad to cite City ‘not suffering from Covid like we did’ as a ‘huge difference’ between the teams. Guardiola had already stressed that City have suffered like every other club in the division because of Covid — they have not publicly named all cases for reasons of medical confidentiality, but there have been at least 11 players to have tested positive — and was momentarily lost for words when the claims of Van Dijk and Tuchel were put to him. The City manager then appeared to dismiss it as an excuse just as money is also used regularly to explain why they are better than other title contenders.
