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Rob Dawson, Correspondent
Pep Guardiola has said he’s “99.99%” sure Manchester City won’t repeat last season’s treble.
City are favourites to win the Premier League, Champions League and FA Cup this season after lifting all three trophies last year.
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They will move top of the Premier League table — at least for a few hours — if they beat Everton on Saturday. They also have games in the Champions League round of 16 and the FA Cup fifth round to come this month, but Guardiola has played down his team’s chances of becoming the first English team to win back-to-back trebles.
“This is a fairytale, it’s more complicated than that,” Guardiola told a news conference on Friday.
“Try to beat Everton and we will see what happens. We have 99.99% possibility that we are not going to win the treble because never, never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever has [anyone] done it.
“If it was easy, another team — Manchester United in that time — would do it again. It’s not easy.
“Everything is so difficult in this business, what we did in the past doesn’t guarantee anything. You have to do all the things again every three days to stay there until the end.
“Hopefully we arrive in March and April with the same feeling to fight for the titles in May. This is the target.”
City have been boosted by the returns of Kevin De Bruyne, Erling Haaland and John Stones and extended their winning run to nine games with the 3-1 victory over Brentford on Monday.
Everton visit the Etihad on Saturday looking for their first away win at City since 2010 but Guardiola has told his team to be “careful.”
“It is [dangerous],” he said.
“Too much of ‘how good are we’ or ‘how good, City are back.’ No no, be careful. We will see. The fact we won the last five games [in the Premier League] is no guarantee we’re going to win the next game. We have to do it again.
“From the experience we have together we know that in these stages every game is a final. Sixteen games is a lot of Premier League games but knowing and seeing our contenders like Liverpool especially and Arsenal but Aston Villa and Tottenham are always there, I don’t have the feeling they’re going to drop much points. We have to try to continue the rhythm.”