Pep Guardiola has taken the hit for Manchester City's woes, but if he is to blame then so are plenty of others.

If the manager should be getting more out of the players, then the chairman should not have allowed the situation should develop and neither should the owner. City are experiencing what every club at every level goes through, and usually it ends with the manager going - except in this instance it is the best manager in the world who has achieved amazing and unthinkable things to give the club a history that few can match.

Also, while City's coach has refused to criticise his players throughout their run of two wins from 14 matches the squad do have to take responsibility for the alarming drop-off in form individually and collectively. Which, to be fair, they have; Erling Haaland admitted he had to do better after the Villa defeat, and Bernardo Silva spoke this week about the need for everyone to step up.

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"The solution is to be all together in doing a little better individually to return the team to the level that it deserves to be at," he said on Friday. "Pep will of course be the first to want to, to study all that he has to put the team closer to winning games.

"Win the games, keep winning games and we’ll put ourselves closer to trophies. We’re thinking about winning the next game and we’re all together in that.”

One of the reasons the players must take responsibility is that these are serial champions. They are praised for the lengths they go to to reach the top and stay there, so it cannot all be on the manager when things go wrong even if he is the figurehead.

What makes City's situation so fascinating is that there are so many world-class operators at the club, and so it isn't just always on the manager. Guardiola has admitted that he got plenty wrong during this period, and hindsight from Lisbon remembers Silva's assessment more fondly.

City's coach rejected his midfielder's assertion that the squad were in a 'dark place' after their 4-1 defeat in the Champions League, and while it was one of their better performances the run that they have since gone on would suggest that Silva had a better gauge of the dressing room. Guardiola has tried since that point to lift the squad but to no avail, prompting days where he cannot be upbeat about the situation.

It is interesting after a victory that the two voices have swapped roles from their Lisbon positions. Guardiola, in public anyway, insists that the win at Leicester should not hide their bad performance there and their position hasn't changed with either the match or the subsequent time off.

Back to Silva, and: "Personally, I already sense a little difference in the performance levels of the last two or three games from what we showed before.

"We’re confident that we will have Manchester City back to what it should be very soon, which is a team that wins and wins and wins. That’s what people have come to expect over the last seven, eight years.”

Everyone looks at Guardiola for what is right, but the City boss would dearly love for Silva to be on the money again if it means the end of their struggles is in sight.