Syndicated reporting provided by Stats Perform and reviewed by the SoccerNews editorial team.
Antoine Semenyo will be sidelined for around eight weeks after sustaining a knee injury, but Enzo Maresca insists Manchester City did not mismanage the forward’s condition.
Semenyo came on as a 77th-minute substitute in City’s 3-2 Premier League win over Ipswich Town on Saturday and played the remainder of the game.
But at Monday’s pre-match press conference ahead of facing AEK Athens in the Champions League, Maresca revealed Semenyo was hurt in that game and could miss two months.
Semenyo has five goal involvements in all competitions this season (two goals, three assists), with only Erling Haaland (12) and Rayan Cherki (seven) managing more for City.
And Maresca’s focus is now on finding alternative attacking solutions, rather than questioning whether it was the wrong choice to field Semenyo on Saturday.
“Of the five problems that we had, Nico [O’Reilly] started, Mateo [Kovacic] started, Matheus [Nunes] started, then Erling [Haaland] also played from the start,” he said.
“Antoine was the only one [who got injured], so sometimes things happen and you need to just find solutions for the next time.
“You try to control everything, but sometimes it is so complicated because things happen that we cannot control – we try our best and think we about how we can keep players fit.
“We need to pay attention [to workloads] and this is why we made changes against Ipswich, that’s why we also need to make some changes tomorrow.
“There are things that you can’t control, like Antoine’s injury. We tried to save him, we tried to keep him fresh and just give him some minutes. He didn’t play a lot but sometimes things happen.
“I think we made five or six changes from PSG to Ipswich, but again, Antoine was one of the players we preferred to give some rest, and then he played and got injured.”
Haaland will be available, though, after coming off with what looked to be a painful knock in the latter stages of the Ipswich match.
Enzo (On injuries from Ipswich) He [Erling] can be available. We’ll see. We have a session now and we have some doubts. He was quite good yesterday. Better. The rest are more or less okay. The only one that will be out for probably eight weeks is Antoine [Semenyo]. https://t.co/EZvt1rYxBl
— Manchester City (@ManCity) October 19, 2026
City have three points on the board after two matchdays in the Champions League, having been outclassed by Paris Saint-Germain in a 4-2 defeat last week.
But when asked if that loss meant City now had less margin for error for the remainder of the league stage, Maresca said: “I don’t think one game is going to change our plan or our idea in terms of what we want to do.
“The target is always to try and win games. For sure, after the defeat against PSG, we need to win games and that is why I said that tomorrow is an important game.”
Tuesday’s game will be the first between City and AEK, and the Citizens have never lost to a Greek team in their previous four such matches, or conceded a single goal (W3 D1).
The last team from outside Europe’s big five leagues to win away at City in the Champions League was Basel in March 2018 (1-2).
Since then, the Citizens are unbeaten in 15 such games (W12 D3), averaging three goals per match (3.1 – 46 in total).
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