Philadelphia, June 19 (IANS) Pep Guardiola has said there were numerous positives in Manchester City’s 2-0 victory over Wydad AC in their opening match of the FIFA Club World Cup 2025.

Guardiola fielded a line-up featuring several of the youngest players in his squad, handing debuts to Tijjani Reijnders and Rayan Cherki. He was rewarded with a confident 2-0 win over Wydad AC.

“We had good moments, many new players and the first game in this group stage is always important. We started really well then afterwards had some problems, especially when losing simple balls. When you lose simple balls, the transition is a little bit there. But I saw many good things,” Guardiola was quoted by the Manchester City website.

“This is the first game, we’ll prepare the next one with the new players. The first three points is important. We have the second one to try to arrive in the last game to have qualified, then the last game to define if we’re first. The first step is done; this is important.

“We’ll recover, train well in the next few days and then have fresh legs for the next game. We’ll try to step by step improve things. It’s normal in this stage with new players and a lot of people coming from big injuries; step by step we’re going to take the right tempo,” he added.

The game featured a man of the match display from Foden, who weighed in with an assist as well as his early strike. At 25, Foden was one of the “veterans” on the pitch, now in his ninth season under Guardiola. Other long serving players in the side included Ederson and Nathan Ake.

“It was important for us to start the tournament with a win. I thought we had some good moments out there today, but there are definitely things we can improve on. We’ll use these first few days to work on those. We’ve got some exciting new players in the squad,” Foden, who opened the scoring within the first two minutes, told FIFA.

–IANS

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