Pep Guardiola fears an injury crisis could derail Manchester City’s Premier League title hopes even further after an injury-time Enzo Fernandez equaliser saw his team concede more ground to Arsenal at the top of the table.<\/p>\n
City trail the Gunners by six points after Chelsea’s Argentine midfielder forced them to settle for a second successive draw which was compounded by seeing central defenders Josko Gvardiol and Ruben Dias limp off to join a casualty list that already includes John Stones and Nico Gonzalez.<\/p>\n
City entertain Brighton and Hove Albion on Wednesday night knowing that another slip could prove fatal in their bid to keep the Gunners in their sights.<\/p>\n
Guardiola said: “We will see tomorrow but it doesn’t look good. With Josko and Ruben, we’ll see what happens.<\/p>\n
“We have a lot of injuries. John Stones is missing for I don’t know how many months. Ruben now will be out, Josko will be out. Nathan Ake? Always we know with Nathan that he cannot play regularly.<\/p>\n
“That’s the situation. Stay strong and we will find a solution. The spirit is there and will be there, but of course I have concerns. Have you seen the bench today? Four players from the academy – and now we will have more. We don’t have players.”<\/p>\n
Asked if the crisis could force City to go into the transfer market for reinforcements this month as they pursue a \u00a365million deal for Bournemouth’s Antoine Semenyo, the City manager added: “I don’t think so but we’ll see what happens because I know Ruben is a big loss and Josko is a big loss.”<\/p>\n
Guardiola refused to speculate on whether his team’s title hopes have been irrevocably damaged by successive draws just a week into the new year.<\/p>\n
He said: “I don’t have a crystal ball. I won’t speak about it . I only think about Brighton.<\/p>\n
“I thought our performance was outstanding. But we couldn’t take our chances to score a second, third and fourth goal. We missed the goal after arriving in the six-yard box so many times.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Pep Guardiola fears an injury crisis could derail Manchester City’s Premier League title hopes even further after an…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":227751,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[61,60,8579,112],"class_list":["post-227750","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-sports","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-manchester-city","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/227750","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=227750"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/227750\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/227751"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=227750"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=227750"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=227750"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}