Manchester City manager Manuel Pellegrini has expressed his delight at seeing his side produce a dominant home display in their 5-0 demolition of Newcastle.
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City went 3-0 up inside the opening 25 minutes as they cruised to victory and closed the gap on Premier League leaders Chelsea to five points.
Pellegrini’s men have often struggled to impose themselves and break teams down at home, but the City boss believes they may have turned a corner.
“The last three here we didn’t win, so it’s important to have three points more, to continue playing the way we did today, as we always try to be a scoring team, and also not to concede goals,” he said.
Manchester City striker Edin Dzeko is confident his side can catch Chelsea in the title race
“I don’t know if it was the best, but it was a good performance here at home because I think we’ve lost too many things here.
“We lost the FA Cup, we lost the Capital One Cup here at home without scoring goals. So I think it’s important to be a scoring team at home.”
City’s game came after Chelsea were surprisingly held at home by Burnley, while Manchester United slipped to a 2-1 defeat at Swansea.
But Pellegrini was adamant his players were not thinking about the fortunes of their title rivals, and they are just thinking about their next match.
“We didn’t think about Chelsea and Manchester United,” he added.
“I said before the game ‘we are not thinking of other teams, we are just thinking of our performance and of the next game’.
'Nobody knows'
“After now, we are going to start thinking about Barcelona, and after that Liverpool, but the other teams, we can do nothing about what they do in their games so we are not worried about that.”
Saturday’s results have injected life into the Premier League title race but, with teams at the top regularly dropping points to bottom-half sides, Pellegrini believes there will be several twists and turns before the season is up.
“I think all teams will drop points,” he said.
“We must try not to drop one more because we’ve already dropped too many points, but after this game we have 36 more points to play for and nobody knows who will win the title.
“Of course the more points you have the better but nobody can know what will happen in the future.
“The only way is to continue to try to play the way we did today, try to win all our games, and at the end of the season we will see which team has more points.”