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Pep refuses to take Jose’s bait
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Pep Guardiola refused to be drawn into a war of words with Jose Mourinho after Manchester City maintained its impressive progress towards the English Premier League title.
City stretched its commanding advantage at the top to 15 points over Manchester United as Raheem Sterling sealed a 1-0 win at Newcastle United to record an 18th consecutive league victory, one short of Bayern Munich’s current best for Europe’s top five leagues of 19 straight wins.
United manager Mourinho tried to provoke Guardiola on Tuesday after pointing to his huge spending power by claiming “City buy fullbacks for the price of strikers” and insisting the 300 million pounds (US$402 million) he has spent since taking charge at Old Trafford 18 months ago as “not enough”.
Mourinho paid 93 million pounds to sign France midfielder Paul Pogba, while also recruiting 30-million pound defender Eric Bailly, and midfielder Henrikh Mkhitaryan for 26.3 million pounds.
This year, United spent 75 million pounds on striker Romelu Lukaku, as well as 31 million pounds on defender Victor Lindelof and 40 million pounds for midfielder Nemanja Matic.
In comparison, City bought three defenders — Kyle Walker from Tottenham for an initial 45 million pounds, Benjamin Mendy from Monaco for 52 million pounds and Danilo from Real Madrid for 26.5 million pounds as part of a summer outlay that topped 200 million pounds.
When asked about the comments made by the Portuguese, Guardiola said: “I’m so delighted to be here to speak about what happened on the pitch.
“About what happened with my colleague speaking off the pitch in the press conference, I’m not the right guy. You want to talk about what happened today on the pitch, I will answer.”
Mourinho’s gripe about City’s spending power met little sympathy in north London with Arsenal manager Arsene Wenger saying he had learned to deal with his club’s inability to compete with the financial elite for more than two decades.
“I have been in that position for 21 years so I will not start to complain now. There is always one team, sometimes four, who were richer than I was, so I learnt to cope with that and to deal with that,” Wenger told the British media.
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