Manchester City will draft in players from the club's youth academy for Thursday's League Cup match at home to Bournemouth with manager Pep Guardiola saying he did not have the squad size to compete in two competitions at this stage of the campaign.
The delayed start to the season means the third round of the League Cup, in which City is the champion, comes three days after its opening 3-1 win at Wolverhampton Wanderers on Monday.
“Against Bournemouth we will play most players from the academy and try to keep energy in the Premier League. With the lack of preparation and seven players out, we have to keep the players who played today as fresh as possible,” he said.
“We won the Carabao (League) 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,” said the Spaniard.
City was without several key players at Wolves with Ilkay Gundogan missing after testing positive for COVID-19 and Sergio Aguero and Aymeric Laporte ruled out in advance with injuries.
Bernardo Silva, Joao Cancelo, Oleksandr Zinchenko and Eric Garcia were also sidelined after picking up injuries in training meaning three young players were on the bench.
Despite the absentees, City opened up a 2-0 lead thanks to a Kevin De Bruyne penalty and a Phil Foden goal and while Wolves fought back well after the break, with Raul Jimenez finding the target, Gabriel Jesus added a third for City in stoppage time.
“The period that we are in and the situation that we had in these last two weeks, I expect that in some moments we suffer, but in general we controlled the game,” said Guardiola.
“Everyone was ready and did well. It was important (to start like this) but of course it is just one game.”
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