Early Friday morning and Pep Guardiola is receiving a second piece of terrible team news before Manchester City’s pivotal trip to Chelsea for Saturday’s late match.
Sergio Agüero, who has scored seven goals in eight appearances, has been injured in a car accident in Amsterdam and is ruled out of the game with a broken rib.
Twenty-four hours earlier the left-back Benjamin Mendy, the £52m summer signing whose attacking flair has injected pace and potency into City, was diagnosed with a ruptured anterior cruciate ligament, making him unavailable until most likely April.
City have made a flying start to the campaign, winning eight of their nine games. They are Premier League leaders and top their Champions League group. Yet as Guardiola bills the fixture with Chelsea as key to City’s title aspirations, the Agüero-Mendy double whammy could not arrive at a worse time.
The manager’s hope is that his side can be inspired by the setback and help his quest to make City as powerful as Bayern Munich and Barcelona,
Chris Heisey #14 Womens Jersey the two teams he previously managed.
“We want to become a big club. I’ve been at two amazing clubs in my life and you have to overcome this situation,” he says. “If we start to complain we’ll never reach the step we want to take. I prefer to play with men who are strong. I’d like to play with Sergio because we are strong with him. But he’s not there, no complaints. We’ll go there and play the way we’d have done it with Sergio, [Vincent] Kompany [also out], Mendy. We have to overcome these situations if you want to become a team that others consider big and say it doesn’t matter what happens.
“The big clubs do it. They overcome the difficult situations. We’ve broken two pieces [in Agüero and Mendy], it’s how do we react. It’s always difficult at Stamford Bridge, the last champions of the Premier League,
http://www.officialnationalshop.com/authentic-20-daniel-murphy-jersey.html always complicated. If people are saying we can’t do it now, then we’ll never reach what we want in the next five or six years.”
Gabriel Jesus’s form has been as excellent as that of Agüero, the Brazilian registering five times in eight appearances. Given this and how Guardiola dropped the Argentinian for Jesus last season, it suggests the loss of Agüero may not be as crucial as that of Mendy.
Before the injury the Frenchman had featured in five of the eight victories and given City an extra dimension, his strong personality also bolstering team spirit.
Darian Thompson Womens Jersey Guardiola believes Mendy is unique and that he will have to tinker with City’s approach at Stamford Bridge.
“We can’t replace him – in the way he plays, the way he goes up and down, you can’t,” says the head coach. “We have to do it in a different way. Nobody in the world has his energy, his mood on the pitch, in the locker room. But we have other qualities in other players and we have to find a balance.”
Guardiola is conscious how last year’s first meeting with Antonio Conte’s side proved season-defining.
http://www.officialgiantsfootballs.com/Damon-Harrison-Jersey-Cheap Rewind to last December and he was left a deeply frustrated manager at the final whistle at the Etihad Stadium. The 46-year-old had witnessed City losing 3-1 and Agüero and Fernandinho being sent off in an angry end to the defeat.
