Manchester City face Bournemouth hoping to avoid ‘Typical City’

Manchester City fans call their own team Typical City for a simple reason: as good as things can possibly be, somewhere along the way the Blues will screw things up. And if there’s a moment for Typical City to happen, it’s on Saturday.

The Blues welcome AFC Bournemouth to the Etihad looking to extend a 16-game winning streak in the Premier League after the midweek heroics against Leicester City in the League Cup quarterfinals, and things just couldn’t be better for the leaders right now. City score goals for fun, play beautiful football that wins games and may already be champions in December.

Bournemouth are in terrible form in the league and are very much in a relegation battle, winning just one of their last seven matches and coming to the Etihad battling a number of injuries to key players.

Everything points to an easy win for the Blues, and that’s where the danger lies. The Blues will need to be at their best and take the Cherries very seriously. If they don’t, we could easily get a Typical City game.

MATCH INFO, TV & STREAMING

Date/Time: Saturday, December 23, 2017, 3pm GMT (UK), 4pm WAT (Nigeria), 10am ET, 7am PT (USA), 8:30pm IST (India)

Venue: Etihad Stadium, Manchester, England

Television: Not Televised (UK), NBCSN (USA), SuperSport 3 (Nigeria), Sportsnet World (Canada), Star Sports Select 1 (India)

Online streaming: NBC Sports Live, NBC Sports Gold (USA), FuboTV (7-day free trial, click here to sign up)

(Listings via LiveSoccerTV)

TEAM NEWS

There was a late training session on Friday night, and it brought us some amazing news: David Silva is back! After taking the week off to deal with personal issues, the Spanish magician was pictured in training and should be ready to go on Saturday. It’s unclear whether or not he’ll be starting given he hasn’t trained for over a week, but he’ll surely be involved.

Two other bits of good news: John Stones and Vincent Kompany also took part in the session and seem very, very close to returning from injury. They’ll probably not be available for this one, but they’ll be back sooner rather than later.

In terms of the starting lineup for the Bournemouth game, we should see a very strong side. Pep Guardiola rested a lot of his key players in the League Cup match against Leicester City in midweek, so expect all of them to be starting against the Cherries.

POSSIBLE LINEUPS

Manchester City (4-3-3)

Ederson; Walker, Otamendi, Mangala, Delph; De Bruyne, Fernandinho, Bernardo; Sterling, Agüero, Sané

Bournemouth (4-1-4-1)

Begovic; Smith, Francis, Cook, Aké; Gosling; Stanislas, Cook, Surman, Pugh; Wilson

PREDICTION

This could be a Typical City game, but with the starters all fresh this probably won’t be one of those: 3-1 to the Blues.