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The worrying case of injury-prone Aguero

After Manchester City's 3-2 win at Goodison Park on Saturday evening, the supporters in blue from the east end of the M62 motorway were jubilant with the situation their club had got themselves into. City will be crowned Premier League champions if they win both of their final two matches, provided there’s no unlikely goal-difference swing in Liverpool's final two fixtures.

It all seems suspiciously too easy, so expect plenty of twists and turns as both Aston Villa and West Ham visit the Etihad this week -- own goals, red cards, scraps between players, tension in the stands, bizarre refereeing decisions, rash challenges ... expect the lot. The season is certainly not done and dusted, and anybody thinking that the Blues can cruise to their second title in three years is very much mistaken and clearly doesn’t know City well enough.

However, there will have been some fans in Goodison Park’s away end chewing their fingernails over news of what happened to striker Sergio Aguero following his substitution shortly after his equaliser. He limped out of the game, something that has been all too common this campaign, although he later tweeted that he left the action as a precaution more than with an injury.

The extent of the injury -- precautionary or not -- is something the fans won’t find out until later in the week. It wouldn’t be a surprise if Stevan Jovetic started against Aston Villa on Wednesday night, for instance. City manager Manuel Pellegrini has plenty of assets in the striking department as it stands, and he may choose not to rush his top scorer back to first-team action when Jovetic would be almost like-for-like in terms of playing style. Equally, Aguero may be in the lineup if there is truly nothing wrong.

Whether No. 16 is injured for the final week of the season isn’t really the issue, however. Rather, Pellegrini must find the answer to why Aguero has missed almost half of the season through visits to the physio -- and all with muscle and soft tissue problems rather than anything caused by being on the receiving end of a hefty challenge.

Bearing in mind that the Argentine has scored 28 goals in 33 appearances in all competitions this season, the question of how City would have performed had he been fit for more than a few weeks at a time must come to the fore. On top of that, there must be serious doubts about whether Pellegrini could ever build a team around him -- true, he’s such a supreme talent that it would seem like a good decision on the surface, but what good is a team’s talisman if he’s injured as often as he’s fit?

Pellegrini wouldn’t so much need a Plan B for when he was without Aguero, but he’d need, effectively, two Plan As.

Consider also the amount of time that Liverpool’s Luis Suarez has missed through injury this season: none. In fact, the only matches for which the Uruguayan wasn’t available were the opening six of the campaign -- the carry-over from his suspension, when he got a bit peckish in the vicinity of Chelsea’s Branislav Ivanovic in April 2013. Had Aguero had Suarez’s run in the team, perhaps the title would already have been decided.

Of course, that’s all hypothetical, and City did well coping without him. Alvaro Negredo and Edin Dzeko formed a pretty decent partnership over the winter months until the Spaniard injured himself in the Capital One Cup semifinal. He has not been the same since.

Crucially, whether Aguero is available for the final two games shouldn’t impact City’s season. If Pellegrini’s men can’t beat two bottom-half teams at home because they’re missing one of his four strikers, the club don’t deserve to emerge as champions.

The nub of the matter is next season and beyond. City fans and their manager have to face up to the very real possibility (probability?) that their star man is injury-prone. Perhaps he’ll never again get the run of games he was able to build up in the title-winning 2011-12 campaign; maybe his quality will only ever be available to the Blues for half of each season.

When the Argentine returned for the Capital One Cup final in March, he was clearly nowhere near full fitness. He played again 10 days later, this time in Barcelona as the Blues looked for an unlikely victory to undo the damage of the 2-0 home defeat to the Catalan side. He was so far off the pace, it was frightening. In the 45 minutes he played in Spain, he managed no shots and made just one successful pass (and that was from the kickoff).

However, Pellegrini has clearly been very gentle with the striker this time around. Aguero was available for the home tie with Southampton but didn’t even make the bench. Fit and ready for the match at Liverpool, he was introduced as a substitute with 25 minutes to play. There’s been no rushing him back this time, yet precautions again had to be taken on Saturday.

The biggest worry for Pellegrini is that it’s entirely possible Aguero’s muscle injuries will never be fixed. The truth is, he’s never really been right since he was carried off against Southampton on the opening day of the 2012-13 season. The chances of him remaining fit for large spells of each campaign are beginning to look slimmer and slimmer -- and given his ability, that could be a real kick in the teeth.