Kevin De Bruyne and Aymeric Laporte will not play in Manchester City’s European Champions League clash at RB Leipzig, while Christopher Nkunku will start on the bench for the German side.
Both City players missed training on Tuesday morning because of illness and neither was included in the squad list ahead of their afternoon flight to Germany for the first leg of the round of 16 clash.
Playmaker De Bruyne played 88 minutes in City’s frustrating Premier League draw at Nottingham Forest on Saturday while defender Laporte completed the full match.
Coach Pep Guardiola confirmed that both De Bruyne and Laporte had been ruled out due to illness.
“It happens. They didn’t feel good after the game in Nottingham. Other players are going to play. It happens sometimes,” he said.
Centre-back John Stones also misses the trip as he continues his recovery from a thigh injury.
Meanwhile, Leipzig’s star forward, Christopher Nkunku, is not fit enough to start, coach Marco Rose has said.
The Frenchman, who played for the first time at the weekend in the Bundesliga after a lengthy injury lay-off that also kept him out of the World Cup, had to end Tuesday’s final training session early.
“Christo showed a muscular reaction after the Wolfsburg game. We will not field him from the start. We must see how he feels,” Rose told reporters.
The news is a blow for Leipzig as Nkunku has scored 17 goals in 24 games this season, and assisted five more, and was seen as the Germans’ answer to City’s star striker Erling Haaland.
In Wednesday night’s other ECL game, Inter Milan could have strikers Romelu Lukaku and Lautaro Martnez in tandem against Porto.
Both scored for Inter in a 3-1 win over Udinese at the weekend – the first time both players had scored in the same match since the final game of the 2020-21 season.
Their goals that season drove Inter to the title and earned the partnership the nickname LuLa, from the first letters of Lukaku’s surname and Martinez’s first name.
Lukaku’s scoring streak earned him a big-money move to Chelsea, only to return to Inter on loan the following year. But the Belgian forward has had a miserable season as he struggled with poor form and injury.
The goal against Udinese on Saturday was his first league goal since August.
“Romelu is improving on a daily basis, training session after training session, game after game,” Inter coach Simone Inzaghi said. “We have real confidence in him.
“He’s giving all that he can and his condition is already good, but he can still make strides forward. He had an injury that caused him problems for four months, so he’ll only improve the more he plays.”
With agencies
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