Antonio Conte apologised to Kevin De Bruyne after withdrawing him just 26 minutes into this week\u2019s reunion with former club Manchester City.<\/p>\n
The change came after an early red card shown to teammate Giovanni Di Lorenzo. Conte brought on full back Math\u00edas Olivera for De Bruyne as he reshaped his side to cope with being a man down.<\/p>\n
Manchester City went on to win 2\u20130. Erling Haaland broke the deadlock in the second half with his landmark 50th Champions League goal, becoming the fastest ever player to reach that milestone in the competition.<\/p>\n
Conte addressed reporters after the game and reflected on how the sending off altered his plans. “We were all left with a bitter taste in our mouths,” Conte said.<\/p>\n
“It\u2019s disappointing, we prepared for the match the way we played it in the first 20 minutes and the sending off changed it. I don\u2019t want to say whether it was right or wrong, but for 20 minutes I saw a great attitude and I think City would have had a hard time against us.<\/p>\n
“Sometimes the devil takes a turn, there\u2019s a cruel twist of fate. Last year we didn\u2019t have a sending off.<\/p>\n
“[Substituting De Bruyne] was the only thing I could do. I felt sorry for the boy, who we robbed of the satisfaction of playing against his old club. But I also robbed myself of the chance to count on him. I\u2019m sorry, these are games where a sending off ruins them and you can\u2019t do the exact right thing.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Conte apologised after substituting Kevin De Bruyne at 26 minutes following an early red card. Conte.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2902,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[238,969],"tags":[1044],"class_list":["post-2903","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-manchester-city","category-premier-league","tag-kevin-de-bruyne"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2903","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=2903"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2903\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2902"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2903"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2903"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2903"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}