Maybe I am not as good as you thought I was, says Pep Guardiola, in defence of his Manchester City players

Pep Guardiola was emotional again: not for the first time this season the man did not look so far away from tears. Yet it has to be said that he protested a little too much about the notion that the players he has inherited are not good enough. He actually denied the notion when it had not even been put to him.

Were they as good as his Barcelona and Bayern Munich players, he had just been asked, when he launched into a soliloquy packed with raw indignation. “I have respect for the guys…” he said. “So why would I say the guys are not good? So I don’t understand the lack of respect for the professionals when they have amazing players and they are not good enough for me. Maybe I am not good enough for them. They are Manchester City players, top players….”

Guardiola became animated, bringing the palms of his hands in front of his face to demonstrate the minute gap, as he sees it, between good and very good in the Premier League which he says he needs to bridge. “Maybe the expectations about my coming here were so [excessive]. Now you realise your commentary were so exaggerated. Maybe our ten games in a row, winning games - and maybe the people [expected too much]. The reality is that we were going to build up [more slowly] and I am working on that and then I will be the first to recognize when I am not able or we are not able to do that to speak with the club to take a solution…”

There is something spellbinding about these performances – and there is plenty of performance art in them – with the intensity and absorption the 44-year-old displays revealing why he is a serial winner. You leave the room knowing you have witnessed grace under pressure and that the Premier League is better for having Guardiola in it.

Yet he knows of course, in his heart, that some of his players really are not good enough. That is not his fault but somewhere down the line there will surely come a reckoning for the club’s Spanish senior management which has sanctioned a £569m spend on players since Sergio Aguero and yet has not bought a full-back since Maicon – a liability – arrived in 2012. Nine of the club’s 14 most over-used players this season are over the age of 30.

From a defensive perspective, the money has been poured away. Nicolas Otamendi plays while young academy defenders Tosin Adarabioyo will not be risked, yet beyond the present company there is also the abiding mystery of the £40m purchase of Eliaquim Mangala from Porto. Mangala had six months left on his Porto contract, could have been signed up to a pre-contract agreement in January 2014 and bought cheaply yet, as they say in football parlance, the “deal died on the runway.” Mangala signed a new Porto contract and cost City a fortune six months later. A nice pay-day for Jorge Mendes when the player moved for all those millions but from a City perspective sheer folly. Mangala didn’t cut it. He is currently on loan at Valencia, where he has played 10 games in 18 months.

This is not Guardiola’s fault, of course. Having spent their five years building a club for Pep, City’s Spanish senior management have sold him some pups. But it is hard to see why Adarabioyo, the home-grown English defender, does not warrant being tested out in preference to Otamendi. Instead, his representatives are now press for a new contract: a £3m pay-day. As Paul Power said of his former club in an excellent interview with The Independent’s Simon Hart this week: “We need more Manchester. I don't care whether you are a supporter of Scunthorpe United or Manchester City, you want to see local players in your team.”

As he continues to unpack his complex inheritance, the very last thing Guardiola needs on Saturday is a Tottenham team in town, with their own very clear sense of identity and direction.

“It is the third season there. They play how we wants,” he said of their manager Mauricio Pochettino. Note those words “third season” because they are significant. It was Guardiola’s way of saying he, too, needs three years.