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John Stones was not present as Manchester City trained at the City Football Academy on Tuesday morning before flying to Madrid
Manchester City are set to be without John Stones for their trip to Real Madrid after the defender missed training on Tuesday morning. Having sat out the Sunderland game on Saturday with an unspecified injury, there was no sign of Stones in the part of training open to media before the team flew out to Spain to continue their Champions League campaign.
While that may make fewer headlines than Kylian Mbappe not taking part in Real's session, it will still require a rethink from Pep Guardiola. The City boss did not go into detail on how long Stones will be out but may have to plan without the England defender when asked on Saturday - he may elaborate in Tuesday's press conference - but Stones has started the last four Champions League games for City after missing the Napoli match in September with injury.
Academy players Divine Mukasa and Harrison Miles trained with the group in rainy conditions in Manchester before the players head off to Madrid on Tuesday afternoon. Rodri and Mateo Kovacic will also miss the game with injury, and it remains to be seen if any academy players will be brought into the matchday squad to accommodate for absences.
Stones has seen injuries wreck much of the last two years of his career, and it was at the Bernabeu that he made his last appearance of last season. The centre-back was stretchered off early in the second leg of the February play-off defeat and was sidelined for the rest of the campaign.
City are still hoping to secure a top-eight finish that will see them straight through to the last-16, but shot themselves in the foot last time out with a home defeat to Leverkusen after Guardiola made ten changes from the team that had lined up at Newcastle days earlier.
Unimpressed with the fact that those who started that night 'did not try' to be anything but safe, Guardiola made nine changes for the game against Leeds four days later for their 3-2 win. He kept the same XI for the win over Fulham and made just one change for the Sunderland victory on Saturday.
"You destroyed me so I said I don't want to be destroyed again for substitutions," the manager joked. "I want to be kind to you. No reason why, I decided that. We'll see what happens."
He added: "Now I have more players. The Bernabeu is not an easy place. I would say we missed the opportunity in Leverkusen to be close. But we're going to do our game. We have three options to make the points that we need to go there. It's another competition. Hopefully we can perform like we are always i wish when you go to bigger stages to just play like who we are, winning or losing."
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