Manchester City goalkeeper Keating fit to face West Ham United says Taylor | OneFootball

Manchester City head coach Gareth Taylor says that first-choice goalkeeper Khiara Keating is fit to play against West Ham United on Sunday.

The youngster withdrew from England duty earlier this month with a knee injury. Manchester City have had some bad luck with injuries and illness in their goalkeeping department of late with Sandy MacIver and Ellie Roebuck having been ruled out for the remainder of the season.

Manchester City boss Taylor has brought in Brighton & Hove Albion’s Katie Startup on an emergency loan but he has confirmed that first-choice keeper Keating will be available to play against West Ham United this weekend.

“Khiara is fine,” Taylor said when speaking to the media this afternoon. “She came back from England duty just as a precaution. She has had an ongoing issue with her knee, carrying some effusion in there. We’ve been managing that and she’s fine. We just felt that it was the right call to protect her a little bit and get her back.

“When you look back at the situation, it was highly unlikely that she was going to start in either of those England games, so it didn’t make sense to push her in the training demands of England.

“It was an easy conversation to have with Sarina [Wiegman] and Khiara was good throughout. We managed to offload her a little bit in the first part of the international break and she has been back in training with us since.”

Going on to discuss the challenge of West Ham United, Taylor highlighted The Hammers’ recent positive results against sides in the Barclays Women’s Super League’s top four.

He said “We expect it to be a tough game. We will have to control their counter attacks because we’ve seen in recent games, particularly more on home soil, they’ve had some really good results. They beat Arsenal and drew with Manchester United, so they’re a team to be wary of for sure.

“We are aware of the threats of the opposition but we always try to make it about what we do. How do we control the game like we have for most of the season?”

With four games remaining, Manchester City have the Barclays Women’s Super League’s title race in their own hands and Taylor wants his side to take care of what they can control.

He said “For us, it is about controlling what we can control and we said that to the players when we got back together; ‘forget what happened on Wednesday night, forget what happens elsewhere expecting teams to do you a favour, we have it in our control to do it’.

“When all things are level, it’s not as if we are a couple of points behind, we are there. It’s for us to take care of our own business and I’d expect Chelsea to be thinking in the same way.

“You can’t expect anyone else to do you favours, you have to take care of your own business and that’s the beauty of where we are. It’s really exciting that we have that opportunity, it’s in our hands and we are going to give it our best to try and do it.”

Manchester City’s Barclays Women’s Super League fixture against West Ham United kicks-off at 2.15pm on Sunday afternoon. Tickets remain on-sale and can be purchased by clicking here.