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Carabao Cup

Guardiola targeting a third consecutive Final

"We have to go there and try to take a good result for the second leg"

7 January 2020

Manchester City manager Pep Guardiola is looking forward to Tuesday evening's Carabao Cup Semi-Final first leg against rivals Manchester United, and already has his sights set on Wembley.

City have won the competition in each of the last two seasons and travel to Old Trafford tonight looking for a positive result ahead of the second leg on Wednesday 29 January.

The winners of this highly anticipated tie will face either Leicester City or Aston Villa in March's Final under the famous Wembley arch and Guardiola says that, as ever, the Carabao Cup is a competition he'd love to win.

"This is a competition we want to win. Of course, at Old Trafford it is different than the Etihad," he told reporters.

"It [United] is a team that is built to run. When they can run, they are one of the best teams, not just in England, because of the pace they have with [Dan] James, with [Mason] Greenwood, [Anthony] Martial, [Marcus] Rashford and [Jesse] Lingard.

“They are good. I saw the lineup against Wolves and they made a lot of changes so I guess they will be focused.

“There are two games. We have to go there and try to take a good result for the second leg here with our fans to try and reach the final of this competition for the third year in a row.”

Asked about how he will look to approach the first leg, Guardiola says City will be focused on their own game, as opposed to stopping the Reds.

“We have to reduce the mistakes in the build-up and be prepared for that,” he added. “But we have to do our game.

“I’m not going to prepare to stop them running. We have to go there to score a goal, to play our game and try and take a good result back here.

“I would like to play at Old Trafford like most of the parts [of the league game], except the first minutes when we conceded three or four chances when they could run.

“The rest of the game I liked the way we played. We created a many chances. I would like to play similar."


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