Leicester City – Manchester City preview: Can City avoid more lost ground?

Well, that was an interesting weekend of football, wasn’t it?

Liverpool will be top of the league on Christmas Day by four points after Manchester City fell to a shock 3-2 defeat at home to Crystal Palace.

Palace thwarting City at home wasn’t the only surprise of the weekend, though, as Leicester City snuck a 1-0 win away to Chelsea to firmly put Maurizio Sarri’s side out of the race for the Premier League title.

On Boxing Day the Foxes will welcome Pep Guardiola’s Man City side to the King Power Stadium, and the reigning Premier League champions will be desperate to get back on winning ways and keep up with Liverpool in the league table.

The history

Leicester City – Manchester City in recent years has been one of the more entertaining fixtures of Premier League schedule. The reigning champions have won the past three games against the Foxes, but that certainly doesn’t tell the full story.

Leicester famously beat City 3-1 at the Etihad during their incredible Premier League winning season, and in the following campaign, they inflicted a 4-2 defeat against the Manchester side, one of Guardiola’s heaviest defeat in the league.

The team news

With three days separating the Boxing Day fixtures from the games on the 23rd, both teams will likely see heavy rotation in their respective starting XIs.

Kevin De Bruyne is likely to make his first Premier League start of the season after having a campaign marred by ligament injuries that have only seen the Belgium superstar appear in five league games all season off the bench.

Sergio Aguero and Riyad Mahrez could also both feature as the duo also came off the bench against Palace on Saturday. City has no new fresh injury problems.

With Christmas coming up, Guardiola has said he will be giving his players the majority of the day off, with the training session set to start at 5 pm.

For Leicester City, they will likely field a weakened team on Boxing Day against the current Premier League champions, with Claude Puel only making two late changes in the game against Chelsea on Saturday.

The prediction

Two teams come into this game of the back of two very different results.

Nobody expected City to slip up at home against a side that has struggled for the majority of the season, and now travelling to a side that just beat of the best teams in the league isn’t what Guardiola wants.

Leicester on their day can beat anyone in the league, and with a decent history of upsetting City in the past, the Foxes could sneak a win and hand Liverpool and Spurs a late Christmas present.

Prediction: Leicester City 2-1 Manchester City

[columns]
[column size=”1/2″][blog type=”timeline” posts=”10″ cats=”660″ heading=”Leicester” heading_type=”timeline” /][/column]
[column size=”1/2″][blog type=”timeline” posts=”10″ cats=”224″ heading=”Man City” heading_type=”timeline” /][/column]
[/columns]