Enzo Maresca criticises Manchester City’s lack of desire after 3-1 defeat at Nottingham Forest
On 7 November 2026, Manchester City manager Enzo Maresca criticised his players’ lack of desire after City’s 3-1 Premier League defeat at Nottingham Forest, a result that made it three successive league losses for his side.
City had begun the season with seven straight wins before the recent run of defeats; Maresca singled out a collective failure to match Forest’s physicality and win duels. “Today I think [the problem] has been general,” said Maresca. “It’s not about one player. In the first half we lost all the duels, all the contacts. Against this team, that is fighting relegation, if you don’t match them … it’s something we need to understand.”
The scoring began when Jair Cunha dispossessed Josko Gvardiol to open the scoring, and Liam Delap then scored twice with muscular surges on the break as Forest recorded their first home league victory since April.
Maresca attributed the conceded goals to lost contests for possession. “In this kind of game, if you’re not able to win duels and second balls like in the first half, you struggle,” he said. “You need desire and intensity to win second balls and duels. You require intensity or you struggle and we didn’t match their intensity. The second and third goals are copy and paste, lost duels first in the middle of pitch then at the edge of the box.”
City’s perfect start to the season had already ended earlier, with a 2-1 defeat away by Aston Villa followed by a 1-0 home reverse against Brighton, results Maresca acknowledged were different in nature but collectively concerning. “They are all different,” said Maresca. “But if you look at chances, possession, chances inside box, in all of them we were much, much better but we lost all of them.”
Nottingham Forest’s manager, Oliver Glasner, reacted positively after his team’s performance, following what the report described as his frustrated response to last week’s defeat at Brentford and his decision to reset and end what he had called compromises. “The way we play football I think we’ve had many better games,” he said. “But how we defended, how passionately we defended, how tactically smart we defended, it was one of our better games. You should control everything and if you want to control it, you have to run because you have to be so quickly aware – they’re so good, such great players, such a good structure and they move the ball so quickly. Of course, you can just defend but you also need to go forward and this is what we did today in the right moments.”
Maresca said City would use the upcoming international break to address the issues exposed in recent matches. “We’re going to use this international break to clarify what we can do better. We know we need to improve things and avoid this kind of game.”