Salford’s players stayed on the pitch a good five minutes after the full-time whistle to show their appreciation to their travelling fans.<\/p>\n
“Why did you bring that up?” manager Karl Robinson joked in his post-match press conference, when a reporter mentioned last season’s eight-goal drubbing.<\/p>\n
He must have feared his side were facing another hammering when Alfie Dorrington scored an own goal in the sixth minute.<\/p>\n
The visitors, however, regrouped.<\/p>\n
Not only did they prevent their opponents from registering an attempt on target before half-time, they twice went close to scoring themselves through Ben Woodburn and Brandon Cooper. <\/p>\n
It was still only 1-0 when James Trafford denied Kelly N’Mai, before Guardiola sent on Antoine Semenyo, Nico O’Reilly, Rodri and Guehi, the latter eventually easing home nerves nine minutes from the end.<\/p>\n
“It’s about us using this as a benchmark to move forward,” added Robinson, whose side sit sixth in the fourth tier of English football.<\/p>\n
“We couldn’t do that last season. We have to get out of League Two. <\/p>\n
“It was a fantastic defensive performance against one of the best teams in Europe. <\/p>\n
“They had to bring on four of their best players in the last 20 minutes. We dust ourselves off and get ready for Tuesday [Newport County at home].”<\/p>\n
Former Manchester City midfielder Michael Brown, who was at Etihad Stadium for BBC Sport, said Salford will learn from Saturday’s experience.<\/p>\n
“For Salford to get to this stage they have done well,” he added.<\/p>\n
“The test was there with this draw, but Robinson will have learned a lot about his players.”<\/p>\n
Garbutt added: “They are a world-class team and they are going to create chances and score good goals but we kept that to a minimum.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Salford’s players stayed on the pitch a good five minutes after the full-time whistle to show their appreciation…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":298369,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[61,60,112],"class_list":["post-298368","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-sports","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/298368","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=298368"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/298368\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/298369"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=298368"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=298368"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=298368"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}