Sawt Falasteen - Man City's Semenyo out for up to eight weeks

Ghana forward Semenyo suffered the issue during last week's 3-2 win at Ipswich as table-toppers City made it seven wins out of seven in the Premier League this season.

Maresca, speaking ahead of City's Champions League encounter against AEK Athens at the Etihad Stadium on Tuesday, was upbeat about the fitness of Erling Haaland, Mateo Kovacic, Matheus Nunes and Nico O'Reilly, but was less positive regarding Semenyo.

"The rest are more or less all OK," he said. "The only one that will be out for probably eight weeks is Antoine."

Semenyo, however, has had a scan which Maresca said was "not as bad as we expected".

Star striker Haaland was seen limping after the end of the game against Ipswich.

"He can be available, we will see, we have a (training) session now. We have some doubts after Sunday's game. He was quite good yesterday, better. So we will see today," Maresca said.

"First of all to lose Antonine or any player for us, it is not good.

"Then in terms of Erling, we said that we can use Antoine as a nine but also we have different players that we are going to try and find new solutions.

"We will see, again. At the moment it is Erling, why do we need to think about a different nine when Erling is there?

"Then, if something happens and we need a different plan or a different nine, we will see," the Italian added.

Maresca is the first manager to win their opening seven Premier League games at a new club.

But their impressive start to the campaign is taking place against the backdrop of being found guity of more than 100 charges of breaching financial rules in English football's top flight -- all of which City deny, with Maresca having repeatedly insisted he "trusts the club completely".

City, however, were beaten 4-2 by title-holders Paris Saint-Germain in their last Champions League encounter and Maresca insisted there was no question of trying to protect players from possible injury risks against AEK.

"It is a huge game, tomorrow for us," said the Italian.

"It is a Champions League game, unfortunately we lost the last one, we need to win games and we are going to try to win the game with our best players at this moment."

M.AbuKhalil--SF-PST