Bernardo Silva has reiterated the importance of City's injured players returning to full fitness as soon as possible, following the entertaining 2-2 Premier League draw with Crystal Palace.

Pep Guardiola‘s men came into the game with John Stones, Nathan Ake, Manuel Akanji, Mateo Kovacic, Rodrigo and Oscar Bobb all missing through injury, whilst last season’s Premier League Player of the Season Phil Foden was ruled out with illness.

Kevin De Bruyne, Jeremy Doku, Jack Grealish and Ruben Dias were all in the squad, but only recently recovered from injuries, with five of our Academy players named on the bench at Selhurst Park.

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The Eagles flew into an early lead with Daniel Munoz striking them ahead, but Erling Haaland headed us level on the half-hour mark. Maxence Lacroix headed the hosts back into the lead, before Rico Lewis found the top corner with just over 20 minutes left to play.

Lewis was then sent off after receiving two yellow cards, but 10-man City withstood the late Palace pressure to earn a point.

“We have to do better, we have to solve our problem in terms of injuries. That’s so, so important,” stressed Bernardo. “If the squad is this short then it is always so difficult for all the players to play three days after three days.

“Of course, we don’t feel sorry for ourselves and have to fight anyway. Of course we have to fight with what we have at the moment. But with a squad of 20 players, if you only have 13 available, it is not good enough.

“For the schedule we have right now, it is not good enough. We have to make an effort as a team to recover the players as quick as possible.

“The result is disappointing, the performance, we could have done a lot better than this. It is what it is at the moment. We fought, we tried to turn things around. It’s always a tough place to come to, Palace away.”

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The draw keeps us in fourth place in the Premier League and Bernardo believes the squad have to focus on the basics to turn our fortunes around in the coming weeks.

“My feeling was in terms of second balls eventually they had chances to run and create a few problems. They had a lot of set-pieces. My feeling on the pitch was yeah we had the ball, we controlled the game and created a few chances, but we didn’t control it as much as we wanted to.

“We didn’t react to when we lost the ball as quickly as we normally do when we’re playing well. We need to get back to doing properly the simple things.

“If the players come back, it will help us a lot.”