WATCH: Premier League returns today!
Watch how the teams prepare to return to the field tonight, while Pep complains of the tight schedule for completing the season.
Liverpool are on the verge of winning the Premier League. AFP/File/Oli SCARFF
The cravings will finally be sated today, as the English Premier League is set to return with a cracker of a match.
Arsenal goes up against second-placed Manchester City later today, and should the Gunners manage to beat Pep Guardiola’s side, it would mean Liverpool only have to manage a win over Everton on Sunday to secure the EPL title for the first time in 30 years.
Matches will be played behind closed doors after teams have gone through several rounds of testing and quarantining in preparation for the restart of the league.
Meanwhile, Guardiola seems wary of pushing his players too far for today’s match and has already warned that they may not all be fully fit for tonight’s clash after they have been largely inactive for almost three months.
In an interview on Tuesday Guardiola, expressed concerns about the workload his players would be subjected to. This after the decision that the league’s remaining 92 matches must be wrapped up within less than six weeks.
“What we were worried about over the (past) three weeks is with the incredible lack of preparation, like other teams in the Premier League, not like for example in Germany or in Spain, where they worked five or six weeks,” he said.
“All the teams in the Premier League, they had just three weeks or three-and-a-half weeks. We know it is not enough but it is what it is.”
This means that teams will play a match every few days, with some weeks seeing teams running out twice. This shouldn’t be that big a concern for a team such as City, which has plenty of world-class firepower on their bench, and Guardiola expects to have to use all the players at his disposal.
“You can play a game after three weeks on holiday, but [with two months] of holidays lying on the sofa doing nothing? That is why the players are not fully fit.
“But we have to start, we have to finish the season because of the damage economically for all the clubs.”
Guardiola recently lost his mother, who passed away due to Covid-19.
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