Man City’s players are scattered across nine national teams this week, and the one thing Enzo Maresca can’t do is coach most of them. Twelve of his squad are away, Marc Guéhi has pulled out of England’s squad with a hip injury, and City come back to a home game with Fulham on Saturday 21 November (12:30 UK) after three straight league defeats. Erling Haaland is the good news. The worry is the defence.

No senior international has been played yet, so there are no minutes to report. Thursday night is the first test, with five City players in two games, England v Croatia and Italy v France.

Haaland back, Guéhi gone

Haaland and Martin Ødegaard missed Tuesday’s Norway session with minor physical issues and were both back on the Ullevaal pitch on Wednesday, according to beIN Sports. Ståle Solbakken had said from the start that both were minor. Norway host Wales on Saturday and then travel to Denmark on Tuesday 17 November. Haaland has played 889 of a possible 900 league minutes for City this season, per official FPL data, so any minutes he plays for Norway are minutes on top of a full club load.

Guéhi is the loss that bites. He went off at half-time at Nottingham Forest on Saturday and asked to come off, and Dan Burn of Newcastle has taken his place in Thomas Tuchel’s England squad, as the BBC reported. City haven’t given a timescale. That leaves Elliot Anderson as the only City player in the England camp, ahead of Croatia at Wembley on Thursday and Spain in Madrid on Sunday 15 November.

The defence Maresca gets back

Gvardiol came off at the same time as Guéhi. Croatia coach Slaven Bilić has said he is fit, and Croatia’s last training session in Zagreb had every available player in it, per Sportnet. So Gvardiol and Kovačić can line up against Anderson at Wembley, three City players in one game. The FPL app still has Gvardiol at 75%, and a knock that City haven’t explained is the last thing a defence this leaky needs to aggravate.

Context matters here. City have conceded 13 goals in ten league games, their most at this stage since 2008-09, and the BBC counts four individual mistakes leading to goals in the last three matches, against none in the first seven. Rúben Dias and Gianluigi Donnarumma have each played all 900 league minutes. Both are due to play for their countries on top of that, and Donnarumma is in the probable Italy XI for Thursday’s game against France, and Cherki is in the probable France XI, per Al Jazeera.

The long-haul group is the one to watch for fatigue. Enzo Fernández and Gerónimo Rulli face Uruguay at 23:00 UK time on Friday and Costa Rica on Tuesday 17 November. Allan and Vitor Reis play Japan on Saturday morning and Singapore at 10:00 UK time on Tuesday. They have 22 league minutes between them, so the Brazil trip costs City very little. Enzo’s has more cost: 620 league minutes so far and two more matches before Saturday lunchtime.

What it means for City

Semenyo isn’t away because of a knee injury and the FPL app has him at 0% with no return date. Add Guéhi, and Maresca has the players for a normal training week only once the internationals are done: matches run until Tuesday 17 November for most of them, and Fulham arrive at 12:30 on 21 November. The BBC called the break “much-needed time” for Maresca to fix a team that has dropped to third, six points behind Arsenal, but with 12 players overseas he has less of it than the headline suggests.

Next on international duty: Enzo, Rulli and Bouaddi on Friday, Haaland and Dias on Saturday, and Anderson, Gvardiol, Kovačić, Cherki and Donnarumma on Sunday 15 November at 19:45. After Fulham, City travel to Arsenal on Sunday 29 November at 16:30.