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Manchester City striker Sergio Aguero was on Thursday night involved in a car crash in the Netherlands.
The club’s manager Pep Guardiola confirmed this on Friday.
Aguero sustained a broken rib injury after a taxi taking him to an Amsterdam airport following a music concert was involved in an accident.
Guardiola said Aguero will miss the Premier League leaders’ clash at champions Chelsea on Saturday, and is also set to be sidelined for Argentina’s World Cup qualifiers early in October.
Reports have it that the striker will be out of action for at least two months, but Guardiola did not have an exact time frame for how long his star would spend recovering from the injury.
“The first impression is he has broken a rib but the number of days he will be out, I don’t know,” Guardiola told reporters in Manchester on Friday.
The prolific 29-year-old was due to return to Manchester on Friday morning, with Guardiola insisting he had no problem with Aguero being in Amsterdam on his day off.
“A day off is to be happy,” he said. “I am a trainer who doesn’t want to train every day because they (the players) need to rest, mentally and physically.”
News of the accident first broke when City released a statement that read: “Sergio Aguero will be assessed by club doctors today after being involved in a road accident on Thursday. The City forward was in Holland on his day off and has sustained injuries.”
Amsterdam police spokesman Frans Zuiderhoek told AFP that officers attended an accident in the city at around 11:00pm (2100 GMT) on Thursday after “a taxi-cab hit a lamp-post”.
He could not confirm the identities of the two passengers and the driver, who all asked to remain anonymous.
“No other vehicles were involved,” he told AFP early on Friday, adding that three people in the taxi “have been transferred to hospital for observation… but there were no bad injuries”.
The accident occurred on De Boelelaan street, said Zuiderhoek, not far from the Arena A where Colombian singer Maluma performed on Thursday.
It is understood Aguero’s accident occurred as he travelled back to the airport to return to Manchester.