Premier League: Manchester City boss Pep Guardiola said he has a feeling that his side will win what would be an unprecedented fourth straight Premier League title.
City are in domestic action once again on Wednesday night when they travel to high-flying Aston Villa. The reigning champions will head to the Midlands on the back of three successive draws in the Premier League.
Addressing the media on Tuesday’s pre-match press conference, while accepting the need for his side to concede fewer opportunities, Guardiola insisted that from what he was seeing and feeling, he was backing City to go and lift what would be a historic fourth straight title – something no other top flight English side has achieved.
“My feeling today is we will win the Premier League. People don’t believe it after three draws but we are going to do it again. If you ask me today. If we play at the level of Liverpool or Tottenham we’ll do it again, knowing it’s not easy. No team has done it yet. That’s the difficulty, (but) if you ask me today how we’re feeling, we’ll do it again,” Guardiola was quoted by club’s official website.
A pulsating 4-4 affair at Chelsea a fortnight ago was followed by a 1-1 stalemate at home to Liverpool before the champions and Spurs then shared the Etihad spoils on Sunday after a thrilling, incident-packed 3-3 draw.
But while accepting he was concerned at the goals going in, the City boss also insisted that overall City were conceding fewer opportunities to the opposition.
“I’m concerned about the goals conceded, yeah definitely, of course I am concerned. But I’m saying the average of conceding chances is lower apart from (the) Chelsea (game). The rest of the games are the same level as the previous seasons when we won a lot of titles,” he said.
“The rest the games are quite similar, I’d say even lower than last year in chances but, yeah, we concede a lot of goals. We have to get better and it’s difficult to sustain it. We don’t have many chances to concede and hopefully we can continue with that,” he added.