Manchester City news: United playing down EFL Cup works to our advantage, says Vincent Kompany

Jose Mourinho has said the EFL Cup is the least of United's priorities

Kompany made his first Premier League start of the season against Southampton (Getty)

The last time Vincent Kompany started a league game for Manchester City it was April. A 1-1 draw with Newcastle that signified a season that was petering out.

The captain’s return to the City starting line-up on Sunday also finished with more dropped points. After the cavalcade of victories that marked Pep Guardiola’s arrival at the Etihad Stadium, Southampton became the fifth successive side to avoid defeat to Manchester City.

Those results may not be on the scale of the meltdown that is engulfing Manchester United but Wednesday’s meeting in the League Cup will be between two uneasy teams.

Unlike Jose Mourinho, who remarked that the League Cup – a competition he won twice at Chelsea – is the least of Manchester United’s priorities, Kompany is not prepared to play things down.

“It is just physically impossible for me to play down a derby,” Kompany said. “The more they say it is the fourth competition, the better it is for us.”

However, Kompany concedes that the pace of Manchester City’s advance has slowed fast. Between August 28 and September 17, City produced four displays that were peak Pep. West Ham, Borussia Monchengladbach and Bournemouth were beaten at the Etihad by a collective score of 11-1. While at Old Trafford, the longed-for first meeting of Mourinho and Guardiola proved a humbling experience for the Manchester United manager.

Since then, however, there are signs that teams are beginning to work out how to stem the midfield tide that is the key to Guardiola’s strategy. At Parkhead, they were harried by Celtic in the Champions League while Southampton’s defence, masterfully marshalled by Virgil van Dijk, so restricted City’s forwards that the first half passed without so much as a shot on target.

However, Kompany is far from convinced that this will be a long-term weakness. Guardiola will sit his team down and use the setbacks to channel a new way to win.

“Since I was a six-year-old player, winning was always a must,” Kompany said. “But with experience you learn it is more important to do the right things.

“Listen, we have had worse periods than this but when it is not going 100 per cent your way you need to stick to some basics that are going to bring you back up.

“We have to carry on, we have to apply ourselves and, eventually, I do think we will get a bit more luck. At the moment it just seems not to fall on the right side of the edge for us. I think in time it will. We are still on the right track but we have to be conscious of the fact that we cannot keep wasting points.”

In less than a month Manchester City have dropped seven in the Premier League and five in two Champions League fixtures. In the aftermath of the 1-1 draw with Southampton that saw him spend nearly an hour in the dressing room with his team, Guardiola played down the suggestion that individual errors were behind the blip.

Nevertheless, without two missed penalties against Everton, Claudio Bravo’s dismissal at Barcelona and John Stones’s horribly misplaced back-pass on Sunday, the stumble might have seemed insignificant.

Pep Guardiola watches on as Manchester City are held to a 1-1 draw with Southampton (Getty)

Kompany disputed the theory that Manchester City are struggling to adapt to Guardiola’s methods. They did, after all, win their first 10 games and even a casual student of football would have been aware of his tactics at Barcelona and Bayern Munich.

“He has brought in a method that most of us have seen on TV and watched a lot so we knew a lot more about his methods before he arrived,” said Kompany. “Now, it is up to us to apply it.

“We are adults, we are highly ambitious and we realise we have to move as a unit and behave as a team. Anything that is said in the dressing room stays in the dressing room but I think it is positive to have some sort of maturity in the team, to recognise we need to move forward. These kinds of results sometimes give you something extra. That’s what we need to get out of it.”