Pep Guardiola bemoans Man City travel arrangements for Newcastle tie

Manchester City must drive back from Newcastle after their Carabao Cup tie on Wednesday as there are no private planes available to fly them home.

Pep Guardiola said the longer journey back to Manchester will only add to City’s hectic schedule, and isn’t helping their injury list which still sees Kevin De Bruyne, Bernardo Silva and John Stones on the sidelines.

Guardiola has promised to rest the likes of Kyle Walker and Ruben Dias at Newcastle, who City face in the first of four away games in succession in the next 12 days.

City would sometimes fly back from an evening away game like Newcastle, or in the south of England, after getting there on the coach or train.

The first option to return from a longer away game would be to get the train home, but there are no rail options after full-time on Wednesday.

In that scenario, City would explore the chance to get a plane back, but with that not possible, the squad will have to make the two-and-a-half-hour journey back to their training ground by coach.

Arriving back in the early hours of Thursday morning, City will then drive to Wolverhampton ahead of their Premier League clash on Saturday.

They will spend three days in Germany next week to face RB Leipzig in the Champions League before taking on Arsenal at the Emirates next weekend.

Guardiola explained: “We just play the game, do it well. It will be good for the players who didn’t play much minutes and the rest try to handle the minutes to arrive well because after we cannot come back by plane because of a problem with something for the planes. We don’t have planes to travel back, so we have to take a bus, it’s two or three hours later, we arrive here so so late.

“I don’t know what happened [with the plane]. The team manager told me it happened the previous one, I think in London. It’s not a problem with the bus but we arrive much much later than we expect but it is what it is.

“On Friday we travel to Wolves so that is why you have to think about… we go to Germany to play Champions League and that is a really important game for us because we know what it means to be able to win there to qualify for the next stage.”