Pep Guardiola will continue to rotate his Manchester City squad in the Carabao Cup and is prepared to use more academy players in the fourth round.
Guardiola handed a debut to 16-year-old Kaden Brathwaite and gave a home debut to Nico O’Reilly, while Jacob Wright came off the bench and James McAtee made his first City start at the Etihad in the win over Watford on Tuesday.
He made nine changes in total, and a half-time substitution between Jeremy Doku and Savinho was pre-planned.
A farcical set of circumstances meant City had to play their Carabao Cup tie with Watford just 49 hours since the draw with Arsenal, and Guardiola insists he will use the competition to rest his senior players.
“The next round, I announce you now: I will play the players who play the less minutes or play the second team,” he declared. “We are not going to waste energy on this competition for sure.
“I don’t know what will happen, if we have a lot of injuries we play the second team. If we have all the squad ready it’s a good competition to play the rhythm.”
Guardiola has been a vocal critic of the schedule, backing Rodri’s calls for players to strike with increasing workloads, and he insisted he has no other option but to call upon the academy, or ‘second team’, again.
“The schedule is the schedule, we cannot handle it anyway differently,” he said, pointing to the positives of his rotation stance.
“Today for [James] McAtee, Matheus [Nunes], Jack [Grealish] who didn’t play [vs Arsenal]. For Phil [Foden] who didn’t play two or three months. Nico, Rico [Lewis] played a lot of minutes but didn’t play minutes vs Arsenal, John [Stones], for the young lad (Braithwaite), 16 years old, for Stefan [Ortega] it’s perfect.
“I saw players who didn’t play lately how they feel, how they are physically, the rhythm. That’s why it’s good the competition, otherwise we wouldn’t win four [Carabao Cups] in a row if we didn’t take it seriously. Last season at Newcastle we played really good [in the third round defeat].
“We play, everybody saw it, to go through, we never throw a competition game. Never. But of course we play 50 hours ago, players play a lot of minutes, absolutely I am not going to play a risk in this competition with the Premier League and Champions League.”
Manchester Evening News
