New boss Garde spreads a little happiness at Villa

Pellegrini insisted City fully deserved to beat Villa, pointing to the fact that the league’s bottom club failed to register a shot on target in new manager Remi Garde’s first match in charge.

Premier League leaders Manchester City and nearest challengers Arsenal were both held to draws as they each dropped points in the title race.

It looks like a baptism of fire for the Frenchman but City manager Manuel Pellegrini is expecting a tough match. “We now have time to recover important players and I think that is important”.

Following complaints from the City players, Villa take the corner and Gestede nearly scores!

New Villa manager Remi Garde will have his work cut out to turn things around here for Aston Villa as they have been awful this season.

He remained in a positive mood despite this, explaining that they “got the clean sheet we wanted”, and defended well “from front to back”, something which they’d struggled to do in previous games – shipping 13 in their previous six league games. Unfortunately for Aston Villa though their bounce here might not be enough as they face a Manchester City team that have been Machine like of late.

Finally, I have to give a mention to the Villa Park faithful. There is a chance after this weekend that the gap grows to seven.

“I said before that it was going to be a hard game”.

“Today was a massive, massive draw for us”, said Villa defender Micah Richards, who joined from City.

Following their reshuffle, City had a chance to catch Villa on the break, but although Yaya Toure’s instinctive pass sent Sterling bursting through the middle, the England winger stumbled inside the box at the crucial moment and subsequent protests he had been fouled by the backtracking Ciaran Clark were ignored by the referee. Nine out of ten of games like this you may lose on the counter attack. Yes, there were elements of luck throughout, but Villa have had no luck at all this season, so it was nice to actually get a helping hand for once.

Kevin De Bruyne is set for a recall after being rested in midweek.

They played a few patient football in an even first half, occasionally threatening the City goal, and defended with great determination as City later began to dominate. We were very unlucky with three or four clear options we had. The former Porto player, who was considered one of Europe’s finest out-and-out defensive midfielders before his arrival at the Etihad Stadium in summer 2014, sat deep, broke up play, made vital blocks and interceptions and, but for the crossbar, could have scored the victor in the closing minutes with a close-range header.

“I will see if we need something”.