Pellegrini can ill afford any more high profile absentees as City aim to get into their first Champions League quarter-final while they also play for Capital One Cup honours a week on Sunday.
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The Chilean manager has stated that he wants to progress with victory over Chelsea, but that the European game will be the club’s main focus over the next week.
“We have only 13 senior players available and must play in the Champions League on Wednesday”.
“We have the Champions League on Wednesday, so we will see which will be the best team for the FA Cup on Saturday”.
Manchester City boss Manuel Pellegrini is expecting his team to improve when they face Chelsea in the FA Cup on Sunday.
Nevertheless a win over Chelsea would be timely for City after their bid to win the Premier League title suffered a double setback following defeats in their last two matches by fellow contenders Leicester and Tottenham.
They do have a good chance of progressing given that fact City will have one eye on their upcoming Champions League tie and are struggling with injuries. The FA generally does a awful job scheduling matches to help the country’s largest clubs do well in Europe, and the FA Cup just isn’t important enough to prioritize over a League Cup final, a Champions League match, or even a single Premier League fixture.
Pellegrini said he would have no choice but to play a weak team if the FA moved his game to Sunday evening to accommodate a television broadcast, but his warning fell on deaf ears.
Chelsea certainly have a lot more riding on this game than their opponents, given that they have a realistic chance of redeeming themselves to an extent by winning England’s premier domestic cup competition. The FA Cup is a very important competition and if you can’t do well in it you must be disappointed.
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Pellegrini says that his selection for tomorrow’s tie has been dictated to a certain degree by injuries, with Bacary Sagna, Eliaquim Mangala, Samir Nasri, Fabian Delph, Jesus Navas, Kevin De Bruyne and Wilfried Bony all unavailable. “We were thinking about sending him on loan, yes or no. We talked about that but he would love to be with us for the rest of the season and he has made progress”. “We are warned. We’ll take ourselves and them very seriously”, said Hiddink, who will be without injured captain John Terry. Guus Hiddink, who won the trophy in 2009, will look to win it a second time and is expected to play a full-strength side for the clash.
