City are back on home turf on Saturday, in their first league game at Eastlands since mid-January, as Hull City make the cross-country trip to Manchester with City looking for their first win in any competition for over a month. This could be as good an opportunity as any, and a win could turn out to be vital with the games against Barcelona fast approaching.
In the earlier fixture against Hull this season, we endured a tough time of it before eventually emerging with a 4-2 victory thanks to a couple of late goals from Edin Džeko and Frank Lampard. That game is perhaps best remembered for being one of Mangala’s poorer games, in which he gave away a penalty and scored an own goal within 11 minutes of each other, giving Hull a route back into the game at 2-2. Thankfully though, we were able to pull it back and get the three points – if we hadn’t, we’d be ruing that game as another reason for being behind Chelsea.
In the corresponding fixture to this one last season, we had an easier ride but not that much easier in one of the first games of Pellegrini’s tenure, when we were still finding out feet under the Chilean. We emerged from that game with a 2-0 win, with Negredo and Yaya scoring second-half goals to give us the win after Hull had given us a pretty tough fight throughout the game.
For the first time in a long time, City go into Saturday’s match with no injuries whatsoever. Eliaquim Mangala and Samir Nasri, who had shoulder and calf injuries respectively, are both back fit and ready to face The Tigers, with no-one else still out. However, City are still without Bony and Yaya, who’re in the AFCON final on Sunday.
For Hull however, it is a different story. They may see the return of Nikica Jelavić, who’s set for a late fitness test before the Eastlands match-up. However, Hull are also missing James Chester (dislocated shoulder), Liam Rosenior (hamstring), Mo Diamé (knee) and Robert Snodgrass (knee) for the visit to East Manchester.
A win to either team on Saturday would undoubtedly be huge, just for what it causes. Hull are currently lying 18th in the table, but a win on Saturday could give them huge amounts of confidence to go on and stay up this season. For City, a win would be important given that we haven’t won since the game against Sheffield Wednesday in very early January. A win would be important, given we need to keep the chase on Chelsea going, and we want to build up some resemblance of form before we play Barcelona in just over a fortnight.
