Manchester City's Pep Guardiola: I don't like playing on Mondays

The Catalan says that he would much prefer to face Stoke City this weekend, rather than having to wait until Monday night

'I prefer to play at weekends, when all the teams play' (Getty)

Pep Guardiola has suggested that he hates playing on Mondays because it brings him misfortune, despite plenty of evidence to the contrary.

Manchester City’s manager says that he would much prefer to face Stoke City this weekend, rather than having to wait until all of the other Premier League sides have played their latest round of matches.

Guardiola’s side need a maximum of 12 points from their final nine matches to secure his first league title in England, having left their domestic rivals trailing this season.

Their visit to relegation-threated Stoke on Monday, though, has left Guardiola looking at the calendar warily.

City’s two Monday fixtures so far this season have brought significant disappointment for the City manager; they dropped their only home league points to date as Everton drew at the Etihad Stadium in August, and saw their hopes of an unprecedented quadruple ended last month when League One promotion candidates Wigan knocked them out of the FA Cup.

However, Guardiola had won every other match he had faced on a Monday as a coach before this season, including a 5-0 El Clasico victory over Real Madrid in 2010, when he was in charge at Barcelona.

Guardiola said: “I prefer to play at weekends, when all the teams play, but Manchester United played last Monday against Crystal Palace and won. It’s just from my experience, and I don’t like it.

“I don’t know if the players can be ready, but we are going to work on that these next few days.

“Sometimes in Barcelona, I remember when we played on Monday, a long time ago, always it was not good.”

Guardiola, in fact, won all three of his Monday night La Liga matches as Barcelona coach. He faced just one Monday game in three years at Bayern Munich, a German Cup tie against fourth-tier BSV Schwarz-Weiss Rehden, but won that too, with one of the goals in a 5-0 victory scored by Xherdan Shaqiri, who is set to line up for Stoke against Guardiola when they meet at the Bet365v Stadium.

Guardiola faced three Monday games in his first season at City and won all of them, too, against Hull, Burnley and Bournemouth – although he did lose £27m striker Gabriel Jesus to a broken foot for two-and-a-half months in the last of those matches.

Guardiola added: “I don’t like to play on Monday because at the weekend, everybody is involved. When the weekend is over, they are like: ‘The weekend is over, there are no more games.’ But we have to play.”