Tuesday 16th December, ko 8pm
Carabao Cup Round 5
Live on Sky Sports
Match Officials:
Referee: Tony Harrington
Assistant Referee: Steven Meredith
Assistant Referee: Sian Massey-Ellis
Fourth Official: Thomas Kirk
Brian Barry-Murphy
“The anticipation for the game ever since the draw was made has been evident everywhere we’ve been.
“Luckily we’ve tried to detach ourselves from that as much as possible whilst focusing on the league campaign, but now that it’s here, I think that the game is going to be incredibly exciting for everyone.
“For myself and the players we still want to show ourselves in the best light and give a good account of ourselves when competing against a side who are the Club World Cup champions. We want to do our best and prepare properly for this game.
“It’s everything you want. We all have aspirations of testing ourselves against those at the highest level of the game.
"Whether we get there or not is unpredictable and not always clear, so this is a chance for us to see what it looks like and to give it absolutely everything, understand the level of opponent we’re facing and respecting it completely, but not being intimidated by that, and to give it a go as much as we can and see where it takes us.”
“We understand for ourselves that we’re a very big club with a huge supporter base," Brian continued. "We’ll have to try to give those fans something to feel exhilarated by tomorrow night.
“Every game that we’ve played in the competition we’ve tried to be on the front foot as much as possible, and to show ourselves in the most positive light. It’s what the supporters want to see both away and at home.
“Obviously the level of competition you face means how often that occurs in the game is different. For example against Burnley we were very proactive and very aggressive, but there were still spells in the second half where we had to defend deep."
He concluded: “In every game each team poses different challenges and a team of this calibre is clearly going to have the ball for spells of the game, and we have to show the different facets of our game to be in the right shape to compete with them.
“That’s something we can do; we have good players ourselves and tomorrow night is about trying to show that as much as possible.”
Enzo Maresca
Maresca has said that Cole Palmer will not be involved against Cardiff and other changes will be made.
‘I’ve already said many times in plenty of press conferences that we have a number of players that need to be protected,’ he said.
‘The target is to protect them and manage them. Cole is one of the players who deserves to be protected right now.
‘In this moment, he’s not available to play two games in three days. So he won’t be available for tomorrow’s game, but should be fine for the weekend.
'We're going to make some changes. We'll see how many, but for sure we have players that in the last 12, 13 days, they've played five games. So they need to probably recover energy.'
Maresca said of Brian Barry-Murphy (who took over from Maresca at Man City U23's)
‘Yes, he is doing a great job at Cardiff,’
‘They are top of the league, playing nice football and winning games. I know Brian and know he is doing a good job. I was the Under-23 coach [at Man City] and when I left, he took over from me. He came to see us in sessions and games and I think he’s doing a fantastic job at Cardiff.
‘This will be a dangerous game for us and we need to pay attention, and be careful, tomorrow. We have the opportunity to achieve something important, which is to reach the semi-final of this competition.’
