Platt pleased with City display

Manchester City assistant coach David Platt was pleased that his side stuck to their game plan against Blackburn on Saturday.

Goals from Mario Balotelli, Sergio Aguero and Edin Dzeko helped City move five points clear at the summit of the English Premier League.

“In terms of possession, you can see that we had total control of the game,” Platt said.

“We knew we had to get off to a good start in terms of rhythm. We took the game to them and created chances. We didn’t let them settle into their game plan really, which was to make it difficult and get players behind the ball, and we did that.”

“We created chances and you felt as though the goal was coming.”

City have recently struggled to replicate their impressive early season form, but showed glimpses of their fluent playing style against Rovers.

While pleased that they were showing a return to form, Platt stressed the importance of grinding out results throughout the campaign.

“I don’t think you can go 38 games in a league campaign and play the kind of football we were playing at the start for the whole campaign,” he said.

“We were sweeping teams aside, but there are always going to be games we had to grind out.”

“I can remember talking after we played Queens Park Rangers away and we ground a result out there and that was some time ago, in the middle of when people were saying we were playing exceptionally well.”

“There are games you have to grind out and there are games which go well for you, and you can unblock them and you can play decent and control the game like we did today.”

“We have a dozen games left in the league and there will be a mixture of those games where we things are not as fluid as they can be but we still have to get the results.”

Blackburn boss Steve Kean was not happy with his side’s defensive efforts as they remained in the relegation zone.

“It is never nice to lose,” Kean said.

“We just felt we wanted to minimise the amount of times Manchester City could play through us. We wanted to play like we did at Liverpool and Manchester United.”

“If you go to big clubs with a good defensive set-up you can cause them problems like we did against Liverpool and United.”

“The problem for us was when we did get the ball back. We never kept it like we wanted to and that was the disappointing thing. We gave the ball away when we did win it back. It meant we didn’t test Joe Hart (City goalkeeper) enough.”