Manchester City beat Aston Villa 2-1 on Tuesday night to climb to third in the Premier League table and take a big stride towards securing UEFA Champions League football for next season. While praising his team's performance, Pep Guardiola maintained that their 2024/25 campaign was "bad." City will participate in the FIFA Club World Cup in June and remain in the FA Cup semi-finals. Despite a late victory over Aston Villa that elevated Manchester City to third place in the Premier League standings, Pep Guardiola claimed that the team had endured a "bad" season. Matheus Nunes met Jeremy Doku's cross at the back post in the 94th minute to seal a dramatic 2-1 victory, after Marcus Rashford's first-half penalty had cancelled out Bernardo Silva's early opener.
The season has been bad, not good," he told Sky Sports. "Whether we reach the FA Cup final or qualify for the Champions League is irrelevant. "The reality is what makes you feel the season is good is the Premier League, not the Champions League, not the FA Cup, the consistency in the Premier League, and we have not been, but it happens.
"The level of Premier League teams is outstanding. The team has changed since the FA Cup match against Bournemouth. Against Man United and Everton we didn’t play good but we fought, we tried to win duels.
"That is the principle and this season we did not have that energy for many reasons, a lesson for the next season."
Guardiola was complimentary of his team's performance against Villa, though, singling out Doku for praise.
"I'm really happy," he said. "We're in the last four, five games and a Champions League contender for qualification.
"One of the best teams in Europe, Aston Villa is a team that plays to the last man. "We played really good in all departments. We were aggressive in our duels, the back four was unbelievable."
Guardiola added, "Football is emotion." "For the fans, players, we have a lot of pressure for the club to go to the Champions League.
"The players behaved unbelievable [in the last two games] - we are really pleased. I understand how Jeremy [Doku] can create something with his speed from the action. And we arrived [with] players in the box.
"The performance was really, really good in all departments."
Aston Villa boss Unai Emery had contrasting emotions after watching his side squander a potentially valuable point.
He stated, "We can't waste time, we lost this match in the last minute, but we competed well and were close to drawing." "We were trying to win the match as well with the subs, but they do the same and they score.
"We played a good competitive match, but they [Man City] dominated more over the 90 minutes. We take a lot of good things, and right now is a good time to be optimistic. I'm going to analyse the match and try to get a lot of information from it.
"We can't waste time now; we have to keep going. We want to try to maintain our current level and be as demanding as possible in order to grow stronger in all areas. "Tomorrow, rest. Thursday and Friday, positive and work hard to prepare for the game against Crystal Palace."
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