Clearly upset with Manchester City’s 2-1 loss to Lyon for the Champions League group stage last night, Brazilian midfielder Fernandinho spoke to Esporte Interativo about the match.
The 33-year-old has acknowledged his mistakes which led to the French side’s main chances, and claimed that when Manchester City started playing well, it was too late to get a good result.
“First half was very strange for us. I think it was very atypical to what we’re used to, especially playing at home”, Fernandinho told Esporte Interativo. “Personally two mistakes of mine, which resulted in two goals from them.
“Then in the second half we managed to recover our way of playing, managed to create some chances, but then it was late, it was difficult to score the second and third goal.”
“But now it’s important for us to raise our heads, to be humble, to work for the next game, and to try to seek this qualification, because it’s very difficult. It’s a group that is dangerous, they are considered to be weaker teams than ours, but it’s a very dangerous group because it has players of quality in all the teams, and Lyon showed it against us today.”
The reporter had barely started talking about Manchester City’s favouritism to win the Champions League this season, but Fernandinho had a long rant about the long way the club has ahead before considering themselves such a big side in Europe.
“I think it’s a lot of naivety to say that. City historically don’t have a very big history in the Champions League, seeing that 15 years ago it didn’t play the Champions League. So it started playing the Champions League, if I’m not mistaken, seven or eight years ago, it got through the first stage five years ago only.”
“So that’s what I think we have to have a little more humility in saying and recognizing that City need a lot. Need to improve a lot to reach the Champions League final. It needs a lot to say it’s great in Europe yet. Of course we are in the process, we want to reach this level. It’s just that it doesn’t happen overnight.”
Fernandinho was also asked if it’s true that Pep Guardiola didn’t get satisfied with the the 3-0 win over Fulham and scheduled a training session for the day after.
“I don’t know where that came from, but it’s unfounded. It was scheduled. Just to try to clarify a little, here we have the habit, even playing at night, or Sunday, or Saturday, we train a day after the game. This is already normal, everyone is already used to it. And I don’t know where that news came from, but these are the famous fake news.”
Brazilians didn’t have good memories from Fernandinho due to the 7-1 defeat to Germany back in 2014. Now things got worse with his bad performance against Belgium in the last World Cup’s quarter-finals. So when local outlets reported his mistakes in last night’s match, the comments weren’t very supportive for the Manchester City player.
