Manuel Pellegrini believes Manchester City are back to their best following a 4-1 win over Sotuhampton at the Etihad – their fourth win in five.
Yaya Toure scored from the spot just a few minutes into the game but Southampton came back strongly, eventually winning a penalty on 37 minutes, which Rickie Lambert duly converted.
City responded as if jolted into life and it was 3-1 by the break, with Samir Nasri and Edin Dzeko each scoring.
“The four teams have the same pressure until the end of the season – they all want to win the title,” Manuel said to the official club website. “Everyone knows that they must win – whether they know our result or not.
“We just depend on ourselves until the end of the season – it’s important to continue playing the way we did in the second half because I thought it was a great performance.
“We are enjoying a very good second round of fixtures where the results are much better than the first half.
“We’ve had four wins and one draw in our last five games – maybe we had low performances in the month of February and at the start of March but I think that now the team has come back to its best performances.”
“That was a very different game, in the first half and in the second,” he asserted.
“In the first 45 minutes we didn’t play well because there was a great difference between our lines so we didn’t recover the ball against a team playing very well.
“But in our worst moment, we scored three goals and I don’t remember any clear chances for Southampton in the first half.
“I think that we made an important mistake not to have a small space between the lines, you must do that if you want intense pressing.
“Southampton always had time to turn and create danger in our box. We didn’t recover the ball well but we defended very well. Even though they had a lot of the ball they didn’t create chances.
“It was 3-1 at the break which wasn’t the difference between the teams but we played much better in the second half, we recovered the ball well and made a lot of good chances against a very good team.”
