Manchester City manager Pep Guardiola has blamed Erling Haaland\u2019s teammates for the striker\u2019s unexpected goal drought and has backed the Norway star to keep scoring “for the rest of his life.”<\/p>\n
Haaland has netted just one goal in his last nine games \u2014 and that was a penalty. Before that, he\u2019d scored 38 goals in 28 matches in all competitions in what he described as the best form of his career.<\/p>\n
Asked what was behind his recent problems in front of goal, Guardiola said it was “the team.”<\/p>\n
“Create more chances. Then, he will score,” Guardiola said Tuesday. “Never underestimate the strikers, the goal-scorers, because always they will make you silent.<\/p>\n
“He will score for the rest of his life, that\u2019s for sure.”<\/p>\n
City might need Haaland to rediscover his early-season sharpness in Wednesday\u2019s Champions League home match against Galatasaray.<\/p>\n
The English team likely requires a win to stand a chance of finishing in the top eight and qualify directly to the round of 16 without the need for a playoff like last season.<\/p>\n
Galatasaray\u2019s side should include former City players Ilkay Gundogan \u2014 the captain of Guardiola\u2019s treble-winning team from 2022-23 \u2014 and Leroy Sane.<\/p>\n
City made things difficult for itself by losing surprisingly to Bod\u00f8\/Glimt last week to drop to 11th place in the 36-team standings.<\/p>\n
“It\u2019s where we deserve [to be],” said Guardiola, who is without a number of key players for the match. Rodri is suspended, center backs Ruben Dias, Josko Gvardiol and John Stones are injured, and January signings Antoine Semenyo and Marc Guehi are ineligible at this stage of the competition.<\/p>\n
Nico Gonzalez has missed the last five games because of injury but could return if he comes through training on Tuesday. That would be a huge boost to Guardiola, who is otherwise without a specialist defensive midfielder.<\/p>\n
Reporting by The Associated Press.<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
POPULAR SEARCHES BROWSE BY Manchester City manager Pep Guardiola has blamed Erling Haaland\u2019s teammates for the striker\u2019s unexpected goal drought and has backed the Norway star to keep scoring “for the rest of his life.” Haaland has netted just one goal in his last nine games \u2014 and that was a penalty. Before that, he\u2019d […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":2676,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2677","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-soccer"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/play-live.eu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2677","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/play-live.eu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/play-live.eu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/play-live.eu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2677"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/play-live.eu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2677\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/play-live.eu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/2676"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/play-live.eu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2677"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/play-live.eu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2677"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/play-live.eu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2677"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}