Premier League: After win against Wolves, Guardiola says Man City squad is stretched to its limit
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"With this lack of preparation and seven players out and not coming back soon, we have to keep the players from Monday as safe as possible.
Man City boss Pep Guardiola after Monday's opening Premier League win against Wolves said that his squad was stretched to the limit as the club prepare to launch their League Cup defence.
Manchester City on Monday claimed an easy victory against Wolves at Molineux after Kevin De Bruyne, Phil Foden and Gabriel Jesus struck in their Premier League opener.
The team has seen many setbacks before the Premier League match after three of its players including Gundogan have tested positive for coronavirus. They played the match without Joao Cancelo, Bernardo Silva, Oleksandr Zinchenko, Sergio Aguero, Aymeric Laporte and Eric Garcia.
Man City, who have won the League Cup for the past three seasons, will start the defence of their trophy against Bournemouth on Thursday and Guardiola knows they cannot afford to lose more players.
"All we want is the seven players that are out to come back," he said.
"Now we have a competition that we cannot spend the energy that we spent today, before Leicester (on Sunday), so we're going to play mostly academy players and try to keep the energy for the Premier League.
"With this lack of preparation and seven players out and not coming back soon, we have to keep the players from Monday as safe as possible.
"We will see how many are available, how they recover. We have just three days. We won the Carabao (League) Cup three times in a row and we would like to continue but we don't have the players in this period to play every three days."
(Inputs from AFP)