After Manchester City reached a third successive FA Cup final, Pep Guardiola insisted that beating Crystal Palace in the showpiece will not make it a successful season, vowing his team will next year challenge the newly crowned Premier League champions, Liverpool.
City’s 2-0 semi-final defeat of Nottingham Forest at Wembley on Sunday came via Rico Lewis’s long-range strike after two minutes and Josko Gvardiol’s 51st-minute header and kept alive their last chance of silverware this term.
Advertisement
Last year Guardiola’s team lost 2-1 against Manchester United in the Cup final, having defeated them 2-1 two years ago. But after beating Forest, Guardiola focused on Liverpool’s title win that came after Tottenham were beaten 5-1 at Anfield.
Related: Lewis and Gvardiol guide Manchester City past Forest and into FA Cup final
“On behalf of myself and all the club we want to congratulate Liverpool Football Club for their Premier League victory,” Guardiola said. “Well deserved, no doubts about that. A fantastic team. During [next] year, like it happened the last four years [with City], they’re going to try and retain the title and hopefully next season we can be better, to compete until the end for the title. This season was not possible. So congratulations to Liverpool.”
City are in fourth place with 61 points, one ahead of Forest, who have a match in hand in sixth. The top five teams will qualify for the Champions League. But Guardiola denied that sealing a top-five finish plus claiming the FA Cup will make it a successful campaign.
Advertisement
“No,” he said. “This season has not been good. We are a thousand million points behind Liverpool [actually 21]. It’s not good. Look at the Champions League. We won one game? Two games? We were not good. The club has to take the right decisions [this summer] so next season will be better.”
Of reaching three consecutive FA Cup finals, he said: “It speaks highly of this generation of players, the club itself. We have to be calm now and recover. We have five days now [ahead of Wolves, at home on Friday].”
Forest can leapfrog City into third place if they beat Brentford on Thursday. Nuno Espirito Santo said: “We have to physically recover because it was very intense. This night will be hard on the mind but tomorrow is a new day to prepare and fight.
“We had good situations. City started really well, they caused a lot of problems and scoring with the first chance changes everything.”
Read the full article here
