Pep Guardiola admits he was wowed by what Man City players did on plane ahead of Everton clash

Manchester City manager Pep Guardiola has revealed that his side were discussing how to combat the threat posed by Sean Dyche’s Everton side while still in mid-air on their way back from lifting the Club World Cup.

City secured their fifth piece of major silverware this year when they defeated South American champions Fluminense 4-0 in Jeddah on December 22. Guardiola’s side trailed 1-0 at half-time at Goodison Park but fought back strongly after the break to triumph 3-1.

The Spaniard said: “Nothing is easy. Football is like that, life is like that, it’s how you overcome the difficult moments.

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“We’d love for it to be 0-4 after 20 minutes, but this is Disneyland. In the real football it happens like Crystal Palace when we could not win.

“These players move. I remember on the plane as we came back from Saudi Arabia, I was there sitting in my seat and I listened to the players and they started to talk about Everton.

“Three days ago we started to talk about Everton and I said ‘wow, this is my team.’ They knew how difficult it was with the teams they beat here, the way they play so special, you have to control many things, and we want to be there.

“After many years, we still had the feeling that we want to try it again. When you win a lot, the tendency is to go down and we had a lot of problems this season where we played really well in a lot of games but were unable to win.

“People say, ‘Manchester City is not the same’ but we lost one game in the last 12 and Aston Villa were miles better than us but in the rest of the games we were better. We were better but we couldn’t win,