LONDON — Pep Guardiola has revealed his biggest regret at Manchester City was ignoring Joe Hart’s plea to remain the club’s goalkeeper.
Guardiola will take charge of his final match as City boss on Sunday against Aston Villa, bringing down the curtain on a glittering 10-year reign in Manchester.
The Spaniard has won 20 trophies with City, including six Premier League titles and the club’s first Champions League crown.
But Guardiola has one major regret about his remarkably successful stay at the Etihad Stadium.
He sent Hart out on loan to Torino within weeks of his appointment before signing Claudio Bravo in 2016 and Ederson the following season, AFP reported.
Hart, then an England regular, had urged Guardiola to give him a chance to show he could fulfil the manager’s desire for a ‘keeper capable of starting attacks with his distribution.
“I want to confess, I have regrets. When you take a lot of decisions, a lot, lot of decisions, you make mistakes,” Guardiola told Sky Sports.
“But there is one regret that I have deep inside for many years, that I didn’t give a chance to Joe Hart to be with me to prove himself how good a keeper he was.
“I should have done, not because… all respect for Claudio, all respect for Ede who came in, they were important, but in that moment, I could have said, ‘Okay Joe, let’s try to do it together. If it doesn’t work, okay, we’ll change it’.
“But it happened. Life is sometimes… I have to take decisions and sometimes I’m not fair enough.”
Admitting he had learnt from the experience of dealing with Hart – who has said he was furious with the decision at the time – Guardiola added: “Maybe with time, then and learning. But I regret it from that time.
“In that moment, I said, ‘I believe in that’. Always I am stubborn in my decisions, when I believe in that.
“When I have doubts, I talk with people, but when I’m completely sure, 100 per cent, I say, ‘Guys, we have to do it in that way’, and I have been at a club that has supported me absolutely in everything with that.”
The intensely driven Guardiola said dealing with human emotions is one of the hardest parts of management, particularly with players who are not in the team.
“If in that I failed, I do apologise, but it never, never was my intention or the intention of the club,” he said.
