Mauricio Pochettino snubbed Manchester City boss Pep Guardiola after the thrilling draw on Sunday afternoon
Pep Guardiola refrains from criticizing Pochettino after the Chelsea boss omits a handshake following Sunday’s 4-4 draw.
Following Chelsea’s thrilling 4-4 draw on Sunday, Pep Guardiola stated he had no issues with Mauricio Pochettino, even though the Chelsea head coach declined to shake his hand.
The Blues snatched a point right at the death of a thrilling match that Manchester City had appeared to win thanks to a goal from Rodri in the 86th minute, but the champions were instead denied by Cole Palmer, a graduate of the City academy who was traded to Chelsea in the summer, who coolly converted a penalty in extra time.
As was to be expected, there were many contentious moments throughout the game, and after it was done, Pochettino charged onto the field to address referee Anthony Taylor and by so doing, the Argentinian declined Guardiola’s offer to shake hands after the game; however, the Spaniard felt sorry for his opponent.
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. Having insisted he would apologise 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 continued his analysis of the match, calling it “not normal”, but he also gave his players credit for coming back from behind to split the points with Chelsea’s highly-paid squad.
“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?”
