Kolo Toure press conference LIVE Early team news ahead of Crystal Palace with Pep Guardiola absent

Hello and welcome to live updates from Kolo Toure's Manchester City press conference ahead of the Premier League trip to Crystal Palace.

Yes you read that right, Toure is previewing the game with Palace this lunchtime with Guardiola absent. The City chief is missing with a 'personal issue'. The manager is expected to preview every match with reporters but has been allowed to sit out his planned commitments on Friday to take care of something else.

It will be the first time Toure has spoken publicly since being promoted to the first team back in summer. You can follow live updates right here in the blog so stay with us.

We have a strong squad and of course they are two really important players.

If it's up to the manager, he wants to play every player. He loves the players, every time he has to make decisions to leave players out it does hurt him a lot but for sure we will miss Omar and Ait-Nouri.

But we are strong enough as a squad to cope with their absence.

We just focus on what we can do. We know the quality of Arsenal, they have a really strong squad with a fantastic manager but it's all down to us.

We have the best manager in the world doing an incredible job every day. His passion for the game, he loves his players, he loves his staff and we know that he will take us as far as we can to win that league and for us we just focus on what we can do really.

We cannot focus on what Arsenal is doing. Every game is like a final for us.

When you play for City and you work for City you know that every competition is important and the target is to work hard and fight for those competitions.

We can't hide from that and that's why every day we are working hard to make sure that we can put the team in front of us under