David Silva’s absence has been just as badly felt, with the Spaniard’s creativity in tandem with top scorer Sergio Aguero, who is yet to play 90 minutes since returning from a seven-match spell out with a hamstring injury, denying City a major weapon.
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However, he may also be injured for the Premier League match up against Stoke, a game where City will want their best players playing.
“We’ve had very hard defeats and it’s always important to remember what we’re doing because maybe when you qualify for the next stage of the Champions League, maybe that is the week our performance dipped”.
Pellegrini added Kompany was likely to be out “two weeks more” with his calf injury while there was still no definitive update on Silva’s ankle problem. “We’ve won just one point of our last six so it was important to beat a hard team who were unbeaten away”.
“We haven’t played that much together and it’s been really hard for both of us, but he’s such a great player that it’s easy to play together with him”, said De Bruyne, according to the Daily Star.
“We tried to dominate the game and I am not unhappy the way we played because this is not an easy team or stadium to come to, but it is not the result we wanted”.
The Dutchman said: “It is not a question about tactics, about players or about the line-up if we make the kind of mistakes we did in the first 20 minutes”. I am not unhappy the way we played.
“We will see. We don’t have many days until Saturday but when we arrive in Manchester we will have a look”.
Sevilla, beaten 4-2 at Borussia Moenchengladbach, must beat Juventus in their last game and hope the Germans lose to City so they finish third in the group and go into the Europa League.
But the City boss reckons if Arsenal and Manchester United crash out of the Champions League at the group stages – as both are in danger of – it will boost their rivals’ chances of winning the title.
Southampton rallied and replied early in the second half with a Shane Long header but the visitors were unable to capitalise further on a spell of dominance and were killed off by Aleksandar Kolarov in the 69th minute.
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“We had chances to score but at the end of the day, it was 1-0 for them and we have to bounce back in the next game”.
