Kolo sets challenge for City

[Mark (Blue Army)]

Kolo Toure celebrated his return to the Premier League fray with a man-of-the-match performance in a game against Portsmouth that the skipper insisted simply had to be won.

City's captain flew out of Africa, where his Ivory Coast reached the Nations Cup semi-finals, and helped to hoist his team back into sixth spot in the chase for a Champions League berth.

Toure watched Emmanuel Adebayor and Vincent Kompany take over the goalscoring duties from the recently prolific Carlos Tevez to bounce back from their Carling Cup derby disappointment.

He admitted: "It was an important win for us. If we want to be in the top four then we know that we need to win these kind of games.

"This League is really tough - it doesn't matter who you play, you have to raise your game and try your hardest to win. That's what we had to do against Portsmouth.

"At the start of the season we dropped a few points to the lower teams. But we are strong as a team and we defended well today after the two goals that we scored."

Blues appear to be in a race with Tottenham, Liverpool and Aston Villa as to who snatches fourth place in the table for a shot at the Champions League next season.

Kolo insisted: "We don't watch how the others are doing, we just focus on what we are doing. As long as we are winning games we keep the pressure on, and at the end we'll be in top four.

"We've got Hull next week and then Bolton. They are really important games for us. We need to take the points against the teams who are in the lower part of the table."

from mcfc.co.uk