Gary Breen has warned that more needs to be done to protect Manchester City as teams target Pep's key players.

"Go back to Harry Kane’s tackle on Sterling, it’s disgusting. Go back to Ali’s tackle on De Bruyne.

"They are dreadful and because they are the media-darlings nothing is really being made of it. Go and watch them tackles, they are horrendous," he told OTB AM.

"There’s a difference between crashing into people and making career-threatening tackles."

"I’ve seen too much of it in the past five or six weeks against Manchester City."

"The type of tackles going in have been shocking."

The former-Ireland international added that he believes Kane should have been banned for the challenge on the Belgian, which would have meant that he would have missed out on breaking Alan Shearer's calendar year goal-scoring record.

The Tottenham striker was issued with a yellow card for his lunge against the league leaders.

Breen was particularly critical of the use of "stamp down" tackles and rules which do not allow retrospective bans to be issued once an incident has been dealt with on the pitch. Breen described the regulations as, "Absolute nonsense."

Fallout

The injury De Bruyne suffered against Crystal Palace is not as bad as initially thought, The Times has reported that he may return to action this weekend.