Ilkay Gundogan
Manchester City are looking to go on another unbeatable run after making a conscious effort to improve around international breaks.Guardiola is looking forward to keeping hold of his players for a longer spell this season, but Ilkay Gundogan believes City have already rectified an issue by ensuring they picked up more results in the stop-start period of this new challenge. Wins over Chelsea, Arsenal and United as well as a draw at Liverpool have helped the defending champions to sit just three points off the top of the table.
Ilkay Gundogan said: “The fact that we had this run last season just shows us how important it is,” said the midfielder. We struggled in the beginning last season with us having all of the international breaks. We struggled to build that form. We lost and dropped a lot of points and fortunately it was not decisive for us in the title race, but it could have been. That is why it was more important to stay on top this season as we knew that repeating that [poor form] would already cost us the title as the competition is bigger this season than it was in the last. We need to try to repeat what we did last year in that period of time. I think the manager appreciates that he has a lot of time to bring everyone together and hopefully we can keep the amount of injuries in the team as low as possible and then we can all go for the best possible results.”
