Man City: Pep Guardiola confirms major injury blow as nightmare season continues

Pep Guardiola has confirmed Ruben Dias is set to miss up to a month of action as Manchester City’s nightmare season continues.

The Portugal international suffered a muscle injury during last weekend’s 2-1 loss at home to Manchester United and has been ruled out of Saturday lunchtime’s trip to Aston Villa.

City are in a state of crisis and have won just one of their last 11 games, so missing the influential defender is a huge blow.

"After 75 minutes against United he felt something,” revealed Guardiola at Friday’s pre-match press conference.

"He's strong and wanted to stay on the pitch, but now he's injured."

There is hope, however, that both Manuel Akanji and John Stones can feature after they returned to training ahead of the Villa game.

Guardiola also stressed that he can take experience from City’s poor from.

“I handle the good moments, I handle good the bad moments. I have bad ones in my career as a manager but we were able to come back and now it takes longer.

"I take experience with that. I have had 40 days of bad days in terms of results, that is the truth when you compare to eight years which is much better. There has been eight years of incredible [results] and now we have 40-45 days of [bad results]."