Pep Guardiola admitted he had no choice but to park the bus against Arsenal, and praised Manchester City\u2019s defensive resilience despite conceding a late equaliser.<\/p>\n
A brilliant lob from the substitute Gabriel Martinelli in the third minute of stoppage time cancelled out Erling Haaland\u2019s early strike as Mikel Arteta became the first manager to go five consecutive league games unbeaten against his compatriot. City recorded just 32.8% possession at the Emirates \u2013 the lowest in a top-flight match for a team managed by Guardiola \u2013 in an uncharacteristically backs-to-the-wall display.<\/p>\n
It was not quite enough to secure a first victory against Arsenal<\/a> since April 2023 but the City manager acknowledged his players showed a different side to their game.<\/p>\n skip past newsletter promotion<\/a><\/p>\n Sign up to Football Daily<\/p>\n Kick off your evenings with the Guardian’s take on the world of football<\/p>\n Privacy Notice: Newsletters may contain information about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. If you do not have an account, we will create a guest account for you on theguardian.com<\/a> to send you this newsletter. You can complete full registration at any time. For more information about how we use your data see our Privacy Policy<\/a>. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy<\/a> and Terms of Service<\/a> apply.<\/p>\n after newsletter promotion<\/p>\n \u201cOur resilience was fantastic, otherwise we couldn\u2019t survive,\u201d Guardiola said. \u201cLast season we lost 5-1; today we were close. It\u2019s by far one of the best teams in Europe. I would prefer to play another way, but when we play a lot of games in 10 years [as City manager], the teams defend deep, deep, deep and take a result of fantastic performance, mindset, strategy \u2026 Sometimes it happens. You have to defend, honestly. It\u2019s because the opponent is better. When you have to accept it, you have to survive in that way. And we did it.\u201d<\/p>\n Asked about the possession statistics, he said: \u201cOne time in 10 years is not bad, right? I have to prove myself against another strategy. Now I am a transition team.\u201d<\/p>\n Having finished as runners-up for the past three seasons, Arsenal are five points behind Liverpool, the league leaders, after five games. Arteta refused to accept criticism over his decision to select Mikel Merino ahead of Eberechi Eze after the England forward came off the bench at half-time and set up the equaliser. But he recognised that service must improve to Viktor Gy\u00f6keres, after the new \u00a355m striker did not register a shot during the match.<\/p>\n \u201cTo have very big open chances is extremely difficult, but he\u2019s certainly trying his best and trying to do that, and we have to provide more for him,\u201d Arteta said. \u201cThere were a lot of situations when the chances were there and then especially the final pass was missing today.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Pep Guardiola admitted he had no choice but to park the bus against Arsenal, and praised Manchester City\u2019s…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":160877,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[440],"tags":[49,48,561,82],"class_list":{"0":"post-160876","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-soccer","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-canada","10":"tag-soccer","11":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/160876","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=160876"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/160876\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/160877"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=160876"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=160876"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=160876"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}