City’s first defeat in 17 Premier League games drops them to 63 points, six points ahead of Liverpool, who have a game in hand and visit the Etihad Stadium on April 9.
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Guardiola made it clear that City are now in a battle with the Merseyside club, despite having a 12-point lead earlier this month.
“We have to fight for every game, and every game we win, we get closer,” said the City manager. “I said weeks ago that we needed to score a lot of points to be champions, and that is exactly what we will try to do.”
“To be honest, I think we did well. I never said the championship race was over. It’s perfectly normal. Because everyone fights for everything, the bottom teams won their games in January and February. It will be challenging. We’re aware of it.
“However, it has occurred. We were defeated in a game. We’ll rest and prepare for the next game with training sessions.”
City were never ahead in the game, needing goals from Dejan Kulusevski and Harry Kane before the latter’s 95thminute winner. “They defended in the 18-yard box, which was extremely difficult,” Guardiola said.
“They let us go outside and close all the channels inside, and then they could run with their quality, but they didn’t run very far.” It was challenging. Every time we played inside, we had to move outside and cross the street. But we weren’t there to score for a variety of reasons.
“The first goal was due to their superiority, the second was difficult to defend, and the third was due to our error.” We were on the verge of drawing and possibly winning, but congratulations to the Spurs.
