Kyle Walker sends clear demands to Manchester City teammates amid losing run

Manchester City captain Kyle Walker has sent clear demands to the rest of the Etihad Stadium’s first-team squad amid their ongoing four-game losing run.

Pep Guardiola and his players have endured back-to-back defeats in the Premier League this season following a stellar start to the campaign in terms of results, accompanied by losses in the Carabao Cup to exit the competition and in the UEFA Champions League.

It is the first time since 2006 under Stuart Pearce that Manchester City had lost four consecutive matches, whilst it was also the first time that Pep Guardiola has lost four contests on the bounce in his entire managerial career.

With that being said, Guardiola himself has remained largely positive over Manchester City’s fate this season, pointing towards the number of absentees within his first-team squad due to fitness and injury problems.

Speaking to the club’s official website after Manchester City’s 2-1 defeat to Brighton & Hove Albion on Saturday evening, Kyle Walker demanded that now is the time for “real characters” to emerge and showcase what this club is all about to bounce back immediately.

“This is the time where I want to see the players. This is the time where real characters come through,” Walker insisted. “It’s all good for the last eight years where we’ve been winning everything and dominating games and you’ve got a cigar out when you’re playing, but now it’s tough.”

Walker continued, “This is the time where us as players, us as senior members, have to pull the inexperienced ones or the ones that haven’t been at the club for a while and show them the foundations of this club because we built that over the last eight years and this will get us through this patch.

“It’s football. It will pass, with the players that we’ve got, with the manager that we’ve got, with the club and the fans, it will pass! But we need to weather the storm and after the international break we all come back fully-fit and ready to go for a very important part of the season!”

Whilst the ongoing run of results will not be impressing anyone within the club, Walker went on to explain his belief that bad patches of form always pass, and that the current run of results has little to no say on the outcome of Manchester City’s season as a whole.

“There will be light at the end of the tunnel and I feel this isn’t going to win us the Premier League this period, and it’s not going to lose us the Premier League,” Walker said. “Obviously, ideally, we would want to be top and not losing the games we’ve lost, but it’s football.”

The England international continued, “I feel the teams in the mid-block of the table are getting better, they’re spending money, and they’re trying to break us down with the crown we’ve won over the last four years.

“So this has to make us better as players, better as people, and make sure that we get through this tough patch.”

Manchester City will return from the final international break of the calendar year by welcoming Tottenham Hotspur to the Etihad Stadium as the hosts look to break their losing run of form immediately and start a hectic run of fixtures in the best possible way.