KEV READY TO PUT HIS FEET UP
De Bruyne looking forward to great escape
KEVIN DE BRUYNE hopes a mini-break will put the fizz back into Manchester City’s season.
Boss Pep Guardiola has given his players four days off to recharge their batteries after cramming in 22 games in the last 11 weeks.
With seven stars on the injured list, Guardiola only named six subs at Turf Moor, despite spending the thick end of half a billion pounds on his squad in less than two years at City.
“I’m going away, it doesn’t matter where,” said a tired De Bruyne, who still ran Burnley ragged for most of the 90 minutes.
“It will do us a lot of good, I was feeling it from the first minute.
“I’ve said it before – you feel great for 10 games, then you feel okay for 10 games and then the rest you feel like s**t.
“We’ve got to do what we’ve got to do. We’ve only got 15 or 16 players available at the moment and so we need to get through it.
“We should have won the game. It’s just the way it is but nobody is complaining about the way we played.
“I think we played really well and we should have scored more, but it happens and it’s not even bad defending, it’s just the way it goes sometimes.”
City, leading from a first-half wonder strike from Danilo, would surely have won if Raheem Sterling had not somehow failed to tap Kyle Walker’s 70th-minute cross into an open net from two yards.
The England star’s embarrassment turned to horror when Johann Berg Gudmundsson volleyed in a superb equaliser from six yards to trim City’s lead at the top of the table to 13 points.
Guardiola replaced Sterling soon after his glaring miss, although he claimed, unconvincingly, that he did not do so as a punishment.
But at least his teammates rallied around a player who has hardly been a flop with 19 goals this season.
De Bruyne said: “Okay, he missed some chances, but that happens.
“He has scored nearly 20 goals already this season, so what could we say to him?
“It’s one game. We play 60-odd games. It happens.” Former City youth-team star Ben Mee admitted that Sterling’s miss – 12 minutes before Burnley levelled – was the turning point for his Clarets. The central defender said: “I felt we were in the ascendancy and then they go and miss that. I think it did boost us. “You think maybe it is written in the stars that we are going to go and get one. “We did and it was good timing because we only had a short amount of time to see out.”
After a blistering start to the campaign, Burnley have not won in nine league matches, although the manner of their performance against the championselect felt like a victory.
Mee added: “Yeah, it gives us a good boost. We’ve played a lot of good teams along the way.
“We’re playing some teams now that we may fancy a little bit more and we’ll go into these games hoping to get some good results.”