According to Tasnim news agency, after his team’s 2-1 defeat today (Saturday) against Man United in the first Manchester derby this season, in which City scored the first goal, Pep Guardiola indirectly accused the referee of biased judgment in favor of the Red Devils. accused for holding the game at Old Trafford.
The Spanish head coach was referring to Manchester United’s equalizer scored by Bruno Fernandez in the 78th minute. At the scene of scoring this goal, Man United striker Marcus Rashford, who was in an offside position, ran after the ball and followed it to the opponent’s penalty area, but knowing that he was in the offside trap, he dropped it at the last moment for his Portuguese teammate to it hits The assistant referee of the game initially declared the goal as disallowed, but after examining the scene, the referee considered the goal to be valid, and this incident brought Guardiola’s dissatisfaction. According to the Spanish head coach, although Rashford didn’t hit the ball, he got the focus of the opposing players with his movement, and in this way, he was somehow involved in the scoring process of Man United.
After the game, he told BT Sport: Well, Rashford was offside and Bruno was not. But did Rashford intervene in the game or not? Did he distract our goalkeeper and central defenders or not? The law says… forget it, I don’t know the law but I know where we play (referring to Old Trafford).
Guardiola then said about the moment when Erling Holland, the striker of his team, had a confrontation with the opposing players in the Man United penalty area: I asked the referee, but I did not get any answer from him.
The result of the derby maintained the 5-point gap between City and Arsenal, and now Arsenal can increase this gap to 8 points by winning against Tottenham in the London derby. But Guardiola had a strange reaction to this and claimed that it doesn’t matter to him because in any case his team will not win the league.
He said: “I don’t care about the League Cup because we can’t win them anymore.” We have won these competitions many times. so there’s no problem. Our issue is behavior, to perform as we have so far. We always focus on this. The League Cup is over, so it doesn’t matter anymore. We were not ourselves there, but we were ourselves today.
Guardiola was questioned by reporters at the press conference after the match for his interview with BT Sport and this time he gave a different answer. He said: Is the Premier League unimportant to us? No, it isn’t. Of course, the Premier League is important to me, but with the current situation, after the game against Southampton, if we don’t win, we can’t win the championship. It is not supposed that in the next 25 years, all the trophies will belong to City.