Pep Guardiola’s Manchester City will battle Neymar when they meet a world-class PSG team in the Champions League semi-finals. But Guardiola relishes facing Neymar in the first leg, hosted at the Parc des Princes.
On Wednesday, Manchester City will play PSG in the first leg of their Champions League semi-final clash. Neither team has ever won the prestigious trophy.
Pep Has Nightmares over Neymar?
The City head coach claims that the challenge of stopping Paris Saint-Germain star Neymar keeps him awake at night.
“I try to sleep well last night and I slept when I was not thinking about their players like that!” Guardiola said, according to City’s official website.
At the same time, he contends, Guardiola Guardiola relishes facing Neymar.
After all, Guardiola believes, there’s only so much that can be done against world-class opponents like Neymar and Kylian Mbappe.
“Always unbelievable, the quality of these players they have,” “Defensive strategies [to stop them] don’t work. They are too good.”
“They are incredible players, the quality they have, the way they play,” he added in their praise.
City’s Play
According to Pep, City’s approach should be to try to dominate the game and defend aggressively rather than avoid PSG.
“We will try and stop them by defending together as a team and playing well as a team,” he strategized.
He then admitted: “We are going to concede counter-attacks, they have a lot of weapons.”
“We will concede counter-attacks, it’s impossible [not to]. If you defend so deep, Neymar, Mbappe, Angel Di Maria, Marco Verratti, Marquinhos, they have a lot of weapons,” he remarked, toward the end.
“They are used to playing teams who defend 90 minutes and they find a way. That is not the best way to defend against the team who has everything, it’s best to impose your game as we have for five years.”
“We will have to adjust something of course when you play against these players as we did against Tottenham as we will against Wilfried Zaha [of Crystal Palace] in the next game,” he added.
“But at the same time, it wouldn’t make any sense to not be who we are when we are arriving on this stage for just the second time in our history,” said the coach of City, who’ve never won the title.
“I am pretty sure we will try to be ourselves and get the result we will need for the second leg. The best balance is to have the ball. If you have the ball all the time, the balance is there.
