We’ve Played The Season With No Left-Back – Pep Guardiola

Pep Guardiola recently said it will be difficult to complete a deadline day deal for Leicester City winger Riyad Mahrez.

“Right now, it’s the same as [Alexis] Sanchez and Laporte, it’s not the place to talk about it,” Guardiola told a news conference when asked about Mahrez ahead of Wednesday night’s clash with West Bromwich Albion.

“It’s so difficult. it happened with Laporte because it’s a buy-out clause, when you have to negotiate it’s always so complicated.”

“I have interest in a lot of players, good players, there are many, the window is open until the 31st,” he said. “We spoke many times with the club to see what is the best with the players we have.

“Right now we have just three strikers with Raheem [Sterling], for the next month or month-and-a-half. Gabriel is coming maybe in the next five or six weeks, we don’t have too much and we play every three days. We have to find solutions.

“We played the season with no left-back, we had Mendy but he’s out for six months, so we adapted Danilo, Fabian Delph and [Oleksandr] Zinchenko.

“We played almost all the season without Vincent and we did really well. We overcame the situations with John Stones and Nico [Otamendi], an amazing couple. We have to adapt, if David [Silva] or Kevin [De Bruyne] have to play on the wing, we can adapt several positions to do it.

“I said to the club if Laporte can come now — we were going to do it in the summer — but if he can come now then it’s better, maybe he can help us. If things are not possible, then nothing is going to happen.

“What they have done — I have to trust them. But of course we are thinking about this summer, next summer — the future.”