Manchester City manager Pep Guardiola spoke about the Carabao Cup final after their Champions League defeat

Pep Guardiola cast Manchester City as the underdogs for Sunday’s Carabao Cup final with Arsenal as he played down expectations. The Blues were dumped out of the Champions League by Real Madrid and are in danger of seeing their season fall down around them after a damaging few weeks.

Draws with Nottingham Forest and West Ham in the Premier League have allowed Arsenal to stretch their lead at the top to nine points, even if they have played an extra game and still have to come to the Etihad. They will also head into Sunday’s final in a confident mood after beating Leverkusen at the Emirates to progress to the Champions League quarter-finals where they will be heavy favourites against Sporting.

City’s manager knows that his team are not as good as they want to be, and that they have not achieved the results that Arsenal have so far this season. However, he is keen to see how much they can rise to the challenge against the Gunners as they look to win the League Cup for the first time since 2021.

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“On Monday [after the Carabao Cup final] hopefully we will wake up and it is a sunny day,” he said. “It not crucial, it is a football game, we are going to try to win with a good performance. We will challenge against the best team in England so far, the best team in Europe because look at their results in the group phase, they were first and have lost three or four games all season.

“We will challenge them and we have to see how we are competing against them. After one or two weeks, we play against them in the Premier League and it is a good mirror to see what we have to do to achieve [like] them.

“I am old enough to see that one football game is not the big happiness or a loss is the end of the world, it’s just a game. We will prepare and try to compete and try to see who we are.

“In the end, the results have not been good except Newcastle but I have the feeling we are an extraordinary team with many, many, many good things that I love.

“Still we are not complete, we are not aware in certain moments and departments we have to be more clinical and still we are not but my feeling is it is a question of time. It happened when I arrived here in my first season so it needs a little bit of time, we have changed a lot.”