Manchester City’s Phil Foden has become the latest player to publicly acknowledge a mentality issue within the team’s dressing room, contradicting manager Pep Guardiola’s denial of such a problem.
Despite appearing to halt their poor run with a morale-boosting victory over Manchester United, City’s fortunes took a turn for the worse when Matheus Nunes made a costly error, leading to an equalising goal from Bruno Fernandes and a subsequent winner from Amad Diallo.
This resulted in an unexpected win for United and extended City’s disappointing streak. Guardiola had previously insisted that the team’s performance was not due to a lack of confidence, a claim contradicted by Ilkay Gundogan following the defeat to Juventus.
Now, Foden has joined Gundogan in recognising the squad’s current lack of confidence, describing the situation as ‘unacceptable’. “The game was in our hands,” he told Match of the Day.
“At 1-0 up we were controlling the game. We had a lot of possession. It seems to be the story at the moment I don’t know what happens but we switch off and they score two goals. It keeps happening at the moment.
“We’ve not been used to losing this amount of games in a short period. But sometimes you have to experience this in life, you can’t always win. When things go wrong they then seem to go worse. We have to stick together and regroup.
“You can concede at 1-1 but you can’t concede straight after, that’s unacceptable. It’s just one of those, it’s the way it is. At the start when you lose a couple of games no [it’s not a confidence issue], but when it happens a lot it feels like a mental thing. We need to get out of that and get back to winning ways and pick ourselves back up.”
