Manchester City manager Pep Guardiola has reflected on comments he has made in the past and insisted that Tottenham Hotspur are not a one-man team for Son Heung-min.
Guardiola was speaking at a pre-match press conference ahead of City’s 2023/24 Premier League Round 14 home game against Tottenham Hotspur at the Etihad Stadium in Manchester, England, on Thursday (Jan. 4) at 1:30 p.m. ET.
Heading into the match, the two teams are separated by just three points. City are second in the league with 29 points (W9 D2 L2) from their last 23 games, while Tottenham, with 26 points (W8 D2 L3), are fifth, three places below City.
While the focus was on whether City would move level on points with Spurs or Spurs would move level on points with City, Guardiola said in his pre-match press conference that he didn’t want to “make the same mistake of calling Tottenham the Son team”. 토토사이트
This came after a journalist in the pre-match press conference referred to Tottenham as a “Harry Kane team” in the past. He claimed that Tottenham were a one-man team for Kane.
“We saw a Harry Kane team scoring two or three goals a day, every day,” Guardiola told local media in 2017, after the striker broke out with 11 goals in the first seven games of the season.
Describing Tottenham as a Kane one-man team instead of calling them by their team name, Mauricio Pochettino, the club’s manager at the time, took offense. “Guardiola is a very successful manager at Barcelona, but I don’t call his team ‘Lionel Messi’s team,'” he retorted.
Six years on, Guardiola’s comments continue to haunt him. When Kane left Tottenham for Bayern Munich ahead of the 2023/24 season after scoring 278 goals and providing 64 assists in 430 games for the club, Guardiola vowed not to make the same mistake by calling Spurs the Harry Kane team.