Shaqiri shines as Stoke sink ragged Man City

The motive now would be to better their ninth place finish last season, which is not out of their grasp given the quality of players they have at their disposal.

Marko Arnautovic struck twice for Stoke City in the first 15 minutes, on both occasions finishing off passes from Xherdan Shaqiri.

Despite leading the table at the start of the day, Manchester City now have just one win from their last four league games and are experiencing their toughest spell of the season.

“It was a disappointing start and we could not recover from it”, England keeper Hart said.

STOKE could have won by an embarrassing margin if they had taken all their chances against Manchester City.

“So when you have to play so many games, especially here in the Premier League, that it’s so intense every game, and so often it is not easy for the players not to have muscle injuries”.

The combination of Shaqiri and Arnautovic caused the Citizens problems all game and was once again central to Stoke doubling their lead after a quarter of an hour when Shaqiri was able to pick out the Austrian striker with an inch-perfect through ball. Pellegrini said: “There’s no other reason why we played so badly in this game”.

The coach gave us some things that we had to use in the game and we did very well.

Pellegrini’s squad is likely to play an increasingly important role heading into a festive season which has been traditionally strong for City, as those stars continue to fight back from injury. Tottenham remains three points behind United – the only team to beat the north London club in the league on the opening day.

While key players such as Yaya Toure, Sergio Aguero and Vincent Kompany were missing City still boasted an attacking of Raheem Sterling, Wilfried Bony, David Silva and Kevin de Bruyne, a quartet costing close to 150 million pounds (US$226.65 million). If you ask me, I prefer to be qualified. We were up against a good team but we still needed to retain possession and with the three up top, we certainly had that. We didn’t create enough chances also.

City are next in action on Tuesday night, hosting Borussia Monchengladbach in the Champions League.