MANCHESTER: A bullish Pep Guardiola said he still feels Manchester City are going to win the Premier League for a record fourth year in a row despite drawing their last three games.

The defending champions are third, a point behind Liverpool and three adrift of pacesetters Arsenal.

“My feeling today is we will win the Premier League,” Guardiola told reporters ahead of City’s match on Wednesday at Unai Emery’s fourth-placed Aston Villa. “If we play at the level of Liverpool or Tottenham we’ll do it again.

“People don’t believe it after three draws, but we are going to do it again. We know that it is not easy, no team has done it yet [four Premier League titles in a row] and that is why the difficulty is there.

“The motivation is to do it better. I learned from where I come from that if you want to win you have to do it better than the opponent. We have to do much better. We have to try and not concede chances, or goals.”

City were held 3-3 at home by Spurs on Sunday after a 1-1 draw with Liverpool and a thrilling 4-4 result at Chelsea.

City have been unusually leaky in defence and Guardiola said he was concerned about the goals conceded but the statistics compared well to last season, when City won a treble of Premier League, Champions League and FA Cup.

“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 added.

Published in Dawn, December 6th, 2023