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Crystal Palace win FA Cup: Alan Shearer reflects on ‘year of the underdog’

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City need to get over this disappointment quickly because they have got a massive Premier League game against Bournemouth on Tuesday.

As things stand they are in sixth place and out of the Champions League places, so they really need to win it – in effect, it’s another cup final for them.

Whether they finish in the top five or not, however, I can see there being a big turnover of players in Pep’s squad over the summer.

We know Kevin de Bruyne is leaving and the writing appears to be on the wall for Jack Grealish as well – Guardiola preferred to bring a young kid, Claudio Echeverri, off the bench for his debut when he was desperate for a goal against Palace, rather than send on Grealish, a £100m player.

There could be a lot of other changes too, and there has to be really. This City team has been amazing but they have come to the end of their period of dominance and some fresh faces are needed to get them challenging for the Premier League title again.

Even if they spend big and bring a few players in, I am not sure whether they can get back to the levels they reached under Guardiola in the past few seasons, when they were the outstanding team in the country.

But some kind of improvement is clearly needed. Considering the heights they have hit, for them to be in sixth place with two games to go and without a trophy for the first time since 2016-17 has already made this a very poor season by their high standards.

Alan Shearer was speaking to BBC Sport’s Chris Bevan at Wembley.


BBC News

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