Manchester City midfielder Rodri is fit to return following a hamstring injury as they look to keep up \u2060the pressure on Premier League leaders Arsenal at Sunderland on Thursday, City manager Pep Guardiola said.<\/p>\n
Winger Jeremy Doku, out for nearly three weeks \u200dwith a leg injury, may also feature as City seek their ninth straight win in all competitions, Guardiola told reporters on Wednesday.<\/p>\n
“Rodri has come back. Maybe he can play a few minutes. We need it desperately. Doku, maybe,” said Guardiola, whose team trail Arsenal by five points.<\/p>\n
John Stones and Oscar Bobb are not yet fit to return.<\/p>\n
“We had seven or eight \u2060injured players and two at the Africa Cup of Nations. Five players injured \u2060are coming back a little bit, so in terms of squad we are not in our \u2060best \u200dright now \u2060but in terms of points we are better than last season,” Guardiola said.<\/p>\n
City \u200dbeat Sunderland 3-0 at home this month, but \u2060the manager warned against taking the seventh-placed side lightly.<\/p>\n
“They are tough. The crowd is always, I remember my first season going there, unbelievable,” Guardiola said.<\/p>\n
“They have beaten Newcastle United. Arsenal, Aston \u200dVilla could not win there so they are tough but we at the same time are \u2060ready.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Manchester City midfielder Rodri is fit to return following a hamstring injury as they look to keep up…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":220574,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[61,60,112],"class_list":["post-220573","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-sports","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/220573","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=220573"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/220573\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/220574"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=220573"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=220573"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=220573"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}