Pep Guardiola responds to Mauricio Pochettino ignoring handshake after Chelsea vs Man City
Manchester City manager Pep Guardiola refused to hit out at Mauricio Pochettino after the Chelsea boss failed to shake his hand in the aftermatch of Sunday’s 4-4 draw
Pep Guardiola insisted he has no problem with Mauricio Pochettino after the Chelsea head coach failed to shake his hand following Sunday’s dramatic 4-4 draw.
The Blues snatched a point right at the death of an enthralling game which Manchester City had seemingly won courtesy of an 86th-minute strike from Rodri. Instead, it was left to Cole Palmer, a City academy graduate who was sold to Chelsea in the summer, to coolly convert a penalty in additional time to deny the champions.
Unsurprisingly, the match was full of controversial incidents and Pochettino stormed straight onto the pitch at full-time to confront referee Anthony Taylor. In doing so, he snubbed Guardiola’s offer of a post-match handshake – but the Spaniard had sympathy for his opposite number.
When he was asked about said incident after the match, Guardiola told reporters: “No problem. It’s not a problem. I don’t want to say one word. It’s completely fine. The emotions happen to me sometimes. It’s fine.”
Pochettino’s beeline for Taylor and the match officials quickly went viral on social media, although the Chelsea chief seemed to regain his cool relatively quickly. He still insisted he would offer his apologies to both Taylor and Guardiola in his post-match press conference.
The Argentine explained: “I need to apologise to Anthony, the referees and the fourth official. In this moment, I feel that maybe Raheem can go through and go to score the fifth and in this moment when the game finishes I turn and say: ‘What the ….?’ You know, what’s going on? I said: ‘Why stop in this moment, the action.’
“Then I turned and said “I deserve, I deserve to be booked.’ Because I crossed the limit, so I want to apologise because it’s not a good image for me and for football, this type of behaviour. I also want to apologise to Pep also because I did not see him in this moment.”
Guardiola went on to analyse a game he branded “not normal” while reserving praise for his players for earning a share of the spoils against Chelsea’s expensively assembled team.
The City boss added: “It’s not normal 4-4. Usually we control more but I can’t remember a game when we come here and had the chances that we had. Even the games we won 0-1 and even last year’s game was much worse than we played today by a million times.
“Do you know what Chelsea have done [to build this team]? In the past it was City, City, City who have done that. Look at what Chelsea have done to create that fantastic team? So it’s normal. It was a fair result. It is what it is. Did you have fun?”
