FOOTBALL: Erik Ten Hag Thanks Pep Guardiola after brutal defeat in derby match

Erik Ten Hag has thanked Pep Guardi­o­la and the Man­ches­ter City team for pre­sent­ing a bru­tal real­i­ty to the Man­ches­ter Unit­ed play­ers in last Sun­day’s derby.

Ten Hag’s Unit­ed suf­fered a 6–3 thrash­ing to Guardi­o­la’s City at the Eti­had Sta­di­um, and the man­ag­er admit­ted the defeat showed just how far behind his home­town rivals.

Unit­ed had beat­en Liv­er­pool and lead­ers Arse­nal for four con­sec­u­tive Pre­mier League wins, but cham­pi­ons City were ruth­less­ly beat­en by hat-tricks from strik­er Erling Haa­land and mid­field­er Ben Foden.

Ten Hag, who faces Cyprus side Omonoia in the Europa League on Thurs­day, said the loss to City under­scored the mag­ni­tude of the prob­lems fac­ing his man­ag­er, staff and players.

“We beat Arse­nal, we beat Liv­er­pool, and now with City and real­i­ty, we know we have to step up,” Ten­hag said.

“When you’re in the process, you don’t just go up, but you also have set­backs. We beat Arse­nal, who ranked first in the league, and we beat Liv­er­pool. hap­pened and we lost to them. City were bet­ter that day because we have to accept that but our per­for­mance was unacceptable.”

Bruno Fer­nan­des, who cap­tained in the absence of Har­ry Maguire, said the progress under Ten­hag should not be lost despite such a crush­ing defeat.

”It gave me con­fi­dence and I did real­ly well.

‘It was like that when we lost the first two games and it should­n’t be like that now. So it worked out real­ly well. We’ve set back, but we have to pick our­selves up.”

Ten Hag and his play­ers have been crit­i­cal of the der­by deba­cle and spent near­ly three hours in a meet­ing to rewatch the game and ana­lyze their own mistakes.

“We had a meet­ing and looked at the dif­fi­cult things we did and the mis­takes we made,” Fer­nan­dez said. “And what we have to do now is not repeat mistakes.

“When we start get­ting good results and tomor­row we’ll get back we all know that’s the most impor­tant thing. The main thing now is to get back on the win­ning side and move on. ”