Manuel Akanji missed the UEFA Champions League win over Young Boys, which guaranteed round of 16 qualification, due to a back injury. Akanji was withdrawn pregame, but manager Pep Guardiola expects his defender to be available for the trip to Chelsea on Sunday.
Another player who is now fully fit, after having had recent fitness concerns, is Erling Haaland.
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Haaland, who was withdrawn due to injury concerns last weekend, played last night and bagged a brace. Akanji extolled the Nordic scoring machine’s virtues in an interview with ESPN.
“You can see it in every game we play in, he scores so many important goals,” Akanji said.
“He’s a great player and I love him as a person as well. We’ve spent a lot of time together at Dortmund and he came here and then I joined him. You can also see in training that he works really hard to get better.
“Every day, he never takes it easy.
“Even if it’s shooting from two metres out, he wants to score every goal and that’s also what you get at the weekend.
Sometimes he misses chances and he’s really frustrated but he goes again and scores with the next one. He’s a really important player for our team.”
While Akanji is back fit, the news for John Stones is a very different story. He suffered a re-occurrence of the muscular injury in his hip area, which has forced him to miss a lot of time this season (We covered that here).
He’ll about a few weeks, at minimum.
Finally, Kevin de Bruyne remains out until well until 2024.
Paul M. Banks is the owner/manager ofย The Sports Bank.ย Heโs also theย author of โTransatlantic Passage: How the English Premier League Redefined Soccer in America,โ andย โNo, I Canโt Get You Free Tickets: Lessons Learned From a Life in the Sports Media Industry.โ
Heโs written for numerous publications, including the New York Daily News,ย Sports Illustratedย andย theย Chicago Tribune.ย He regularly appears on NTD News and WGN News Now, while writing for theย International Baseball Writers Association of America. You can follow the websiteย onย Twitter.
