Pep Guardiola
Pep Guardiola discussed the challenges his team, Manchester City, is facing due to numerous injuries affecting their performance and consistency. Despite their struggles, Guardiola emphasized the need to persevere with the available squad.
Pep Guardiola said “Kyle is not ready for 90 minutes at all because he trained few training sessions all season so far and still we are not able to do it for a long time. All the teams have a lot of injuries, hopefully we can turn it around with all the players being fit. The point is we don’t have the players. The four central defenders, all four are injured. And Rodri, the best player, is not there. Kevin is away from his best. Doku is injured. Jack [Grealish] is injured. You can do it for one game but to be consistent you cannot.”
Further clarifying the situation of bench players who were unable to participate despite being listed as substitutes, Guardiola explained the decision behind their exclusion due to insufficient recovery time.
Pep Guardiola said “In the second half if I could use Manu or Nathan or Ruben [Dias] and after that in the last minutes if I need to change the game I could put Doku or other players, but we cannot do it. That is the main difference but we have to survive with that, we have to live with that, and how we behave is good. Otherwise would have played. Having 10 days to recover I would have played but they are not ready. Manu said ‘I felt so bad’ in the training session yesterday that he couldn’t move properly. Against that team I prefer fresh people.”
