You also had three goals ruled out and hit the woodwork twice. Is it fair to say that it could have been more? Secondly, Pep Guardiola was in here a short time ago saying that the Dalot challenge on Doku should have been a straight red. What was your view of that?
“I’m not giving you that answer but I haven’t seen it to be honest, genuinely haven’t seen it. I thought at the time Diogo actually got a foot on the ball, that’s from my angle. I thought he had kicked it out so I didn’t for one second think it was a bad challenge. I got told that there was a lack of force, that’s why. I haven’t seen it so I don’t know to be honest with you, I don’t know. These types of games have swings and momentums and decisions. Like you said, we could have scored more [but] for the slight offsides, however close they were. I haven’t looked at them back but I felt we looked dangerous in the game all the time, even right from the start with Harry’s header. We wanted to have that intent, we knew they are so good at having possession and ask questions of you. Certain times you can’t chase the ball and do that for the whole game, so we wanted to have a real attacking intent and I thought the front four backed up by what was behind them I thought were pretty special today I have to say.”
Amid the quality you showed, there was a huge sort of fight and aggression from every player there. Fans haven’t seen that regularly delivered. How are you going to go about channelling that sort of level of fight and aggression shown today over the remaining 16 games to make sure it’s not a one-off?
“That’s the challenge ultimately and I think it needs to be a version of normal. Listen, we’re not going to have games with the emotion and feeling and everything that today brought, I think we all understand that. But there’s definitely levels of standards and expectations that we need to live up to from ourselves as much as anyone on the outside. I’m totally aware of that. Consistency is the key to any success and if you can find that, then you’re on to a winner, so that’s our challenge. You’ve got to find a way of doing that. Big one next week [against Arsenal], obviously another tough one. But on the back of today, we’ve got a good foundation to build on.”
