Manchester City’s Standard Dropped Last Year – Clichy

Manchester City’s standards dropped too low last season, defender Gael Clichy has admitted.

City finished fourth in the Premier League in May — 15 points behind champions Leciester City and with a points tally of 66 — their worst in seven years.

Former boss Manuel Pellegrini believed his decision to announce he would step down at the end of the season at a news conference in February to be replaced by Bayern Munich boss Pep Guardiola in the summer affected their season.

At the time, his side were just three points behind Leicester but City won just six of their remaining 15 games.

And in an honest appraisal of their poor season, Clichy admitted the players may have subconsciously dropped their levels following the announcement.

He told reporters: “It’s normal. For example, if you’re working and in two weeks you’re going to Hawaii for a month holiday or a honeymoon, you will have to think about this. Even if you know the present moment is important. You cannot just block this.

“You should be able to block it but you’re in Manchester, it’s raining and you know in two weeks you’ll be in Hawaii on the beach so you have to think about things like that. Probably [Pellegrini] was right when he said that.

“We went to the semifinals of the Champions League with luck, of course, because you need luck in life. But we would not have got the semifinals if we were not working hard.

“But after what happened, it happens. We had a poor season in the Premier League. We had a good year in the Champions League.”

Guardiola’s arrival has already given the squad a lift and Clichy says the players are all training hard to impress the new manager.

However, he dismissed suggestions that the players had become too comfortable under Pellegrini.

“I wouldn’t say [it was] too comfortable,” he added. “Guardiola, [Arsene] Wenger, [Jose] Mourinho, Big Sam [Allardyce] — any manager who comes into a new club will bring this thing for the first year at least. That all the players want to play harder and train harder. It’s just normal, if you have a new boss you just want to impress.

“Perhaps when you spend more time, after two years the levels drop a little bit. But it’s not the case that it was Pellegrini’s fault in fact it was probably the players fault because that’s human.

“As soon as you’ve been in the place for a few years, you subconsciously drop a little bit — it shouldn’t be like that but it is and not only in football.

“The fact that you have a new manager bringing something different and of course when you have someone like Guardiola, who has won so many trophies, then you have to adapt and quick.”