Enzo Maresca has revealed that Erling Haaland faces a late check before Tuesday\u2019s Champions League clash with AEK Athens, while Antoine Semenyo is set for an extended spell out after sustaining a foot injury.<\/p>\n
The Manchester City manager struck a cautiously upbeat note on Haaland, though he made clear there are still doubts over the striker\u2019s availability.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe can be available,\u201d Maresca said optimistically. \u201cWe will see. We have some doubts. He was quite good yesterday.\u201d<\/p>\n
The mood shifted when the discussion moved to Semenyo. The winger came on in Saturday\u2019s match for the final 13 minutes, only to finish the game injured. The expectation now is that he will miss around eight weeks.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn the first moment, we expected a worse injury, after yesterday\u2019s scan, we feel better,\u201d Maresca admitted. \u201cIt will be eight weeks, so when he is back in December, it will be like a new player. To lose Antoine, or any player, is not good.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn terms of Erling, we said we can use Antoine as a 9 but we have different players to try. We will see, at the moment it is Erling, we don\u2019t need to think about another one.\u201d<\/p>\n
The issue for City is that the squad does not include another natural striker, leaving Maresca with limited straightforward alternatives if Haaland is ruled out. That problem is made more acute by the fact that Juli\u00e1n Alvarez and Omar Marmoush have both already been tried as backup options in recent seasons, with the latter moved on to Tottenham Hotspur in the summer after confidence that Semenyo could cover centrally when required.<\/p>\n
If Haaland is unavailable against AEK Athens, or later when City go to Aston Villa on Saturday, Maresca may need to rely on a less conventional solution. Phil Foden is one possibility, having spent significant time in a central role during the 2021\u201322 season.<\/p>\n
\u201cFor sure he can be one of the solutions,\u201d Maresca said of Foden. \u201cHe has played there in the past.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Maresca is waiting on Haaland\u2019s fitness while Semenyo\u2019s injury leaves City needing other solutions.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":21839,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[238],"tags":[1047,242,180],"class_list":["post-21840","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-manchester-city","tag-champions-league","tag-injury","tag-player-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21840","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21840"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21840\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/21839"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21840"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21840"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21840"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}