Manchester City boss Pep Guardiola admits his squad is stretched to the limit after their opening win over Wolves.
City claimed an impressive 3-1 win at Molineux as Kevin De Bruyne, Phil Foden and Gabriel Jesus struck in their Premier League opener on Monday.
They remain without Joao Cancelo, Bernardo Silva, Oleksandr Zinchenko, Sergio Aguero, Aymeric Laporte and Eric Garcia while Ilkay Gundogan is self isolating after testing positive for coronavirus.
“All we want is the seven players that are out to come back,” Guardiola said.
“Now we have a competition that we cannot spend the energy that we spent today, before Leicester, so we’re going to play mostly academy players and try to keep the energy for the Premier League.
“We will see how many are available, how they recover. We have just three days. We won the Carabao Cup three times in a row and we would like to continue but we don’t have the players in this period to play every three days.”
At Molineux, De Bruyne was brought down by Romain Saiss and then scored from the spot after 20 minutes before Foden made it 2-0, finishing off a flowing move.
Wolves boss Nuno Espirito Santo, who is close to signing Barcelona defender Nelson Semedo, said: “It’s clear we performed better in the second half.
“We adjusted better, we created chances and moments. We scored late and we knew one goal would change everything.
“We should do better, especially defensively. The result cannot stop us from going in this direction. I take the positives but to play well we must defend better.”
