Manchester City’s Nathan Ake has confirmed he has a hamstring injury, but he’s hoping it’s not as bad as his previous hamstring issues.

With less than a week to go until Arsenal’s match against Manchester City, the injury situation at both clubs is under a microscope.

Mikel Arteta will be without Takehiro Tomiyasu and Mohamed Elneny, and he faces a race against time to get Oleksandr Zinchenko and William Saliba back.

By comparison, City’s entire squad was fit before Wednesday night’s game against Bayern Munich, but they suffered a significant setback during that match.

Nathan Ake pulled up with a hamstring issue in the second half, and he was forced to withdraw from the contest.

Speaking afterwards, Ake confirmed it was a hamstring problem, but he felt it wasn’t as bad as his previous injuries in the same area.

“I’ve had it before and it feels a little bit less, to be honest, but you never know with these things,” Ake said. “We will do the ultrasounds and stuff tomorrow and then hopefully it’s not too bad.”

For context, Ake has had a number of hamstring injuries in his career, and each of them have generally resulted in him missing at least a few games.

By far the worst hamstring injury was his most recent one at the end of 2020, which sidelined him for over two-and-a-half months. He missed 21 games on that occasion.

It sounds like Ake doesn’t think his latest problem is quite on that level, but it’s unclear whether or not he expects to miss any football at all.

If the injury even leads to a one-week absence, it will be enough to rule him out of the Arsenal tie.

In most positions, Manchester City have ready-made alternatives to their starters, but perhaps left-back is one area where the drop-off is fairly significant.

Centre-back Aymeric Laporte came on against Bayern, and you’d imagine Bukayo Saka would be more confident up against Laporte than Ake, who performed well in the previous encounters between the two teams.

Further updates on the injury should surface in the media in the coming days.