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Manchester City manager Pep Guardiola gave a harsh critique of his team following their 2-0 Champions League loss to Bayer Leverkusen in a UEFA Champions League fixture on Wednesday, saying his players "didn't try," , according to Sky Sports.
Despite making 10 changes for the match, Guardiola expressed disappointment with the players, criticising them for playing cautiously to avoid mistakes rather than taking the initiative to create chances. Guardiola acknowledged the challenge of competing for major trophies, emphasising that performance matters more than results. He said he wasn't too disappointed by the Newcastle defeat, but was critical of the team's lack of effort against Bayer Leverkusen, attributing it to his own decisions and the players not trying enough. "We know the competition is tough. It's not about, of course, disappointing results, but always I'm talking most in the performance and of course the results help to have better performance. But I'm not that disappointed about [the defeat to] Newcastle, but the last one [against Leverkusen], for my decisions and we didn't try. Simple as that," Guardiola said, according to Sky Sports. Guardiola said he still has faith in the players who came into the team but believes they were too cautious with the ball. "They played to 'don't make mistakes'," he said. "Not to play to 'I'm going to do something'. And that is so difficult. In football you have to play. In defence, you have to try. If you lose in the actions, you did it. They play to be safe. To don't be, 'oh, I'm making mistakes and I want to be noticed' and that's why it's so difficult," he added. On his move to rotate players, he explained: "In football, when you play on the greens, you have to try things that we didn't try. Maybe I'll have a theory to rotate. You have to rotate because it's impossible to sustain. But I had a lot of confidence in them, still, right now, I have a lot." "I have a huge value of what they are as football players. Maybe it's higher that I think about them than them themselves. It was a good lesson for me. So even [being] quite experienced as a manager, it's a good lesson for me for the future," the Man City manager said. (ANI)
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