United vs City Cancelled Due To Bad Weather

United vs City Cancelled Due To Bad Weather

Manchester United’s pre-season friendly fixture with Manchester City has been cancelled. The International Champions Cup match was set to be played in Beijing, but poor weather has prevented this from going ahead.

Both managers, Jose Mourinho and Pep Guardiola, had previously shown their discontent with the state of the pitch at the Bird’s Nest Stadium following very heavy rain in the Chinese capital, and now Manchester United have officially called time on the fixture.

A tweet on United’s account read: “Due to recent weather events, tournament organisers & participating clubs have decided to cancel tonight’s International Champions Cup game.”


Jose Mourinho previously spoke about the conditions of the pitch where the first Manchester derby to be played on foreign soil had been due to take place and feared his players may suffer injury.

“I think Beijing is unlucky because the pitch is very bad,” Mourinho said.

“The pitch and the conditions of my players are more important than results in pre-season. It’s not a problem for me to lose matches in pre-season. It’s a problem for me, bad conditions for my players to train and bad conditions for my players to play. So if you ask me my objective for the match tomorrow I only have one: take the players home safe without any kind of injury.”

“It’s not the conditions to play a good game of football, but we have to play. We cannot just run away and disappear and not play. So we have to play and try to be lucky.”

“Normally when you say lucky you say lucky because you want a good result. The result I want tomorrow is to go home without injuries and that is the luck I want.”

It has been reported that 70 ground staff had been working around the clock to try and fix the problem, but ultimately this was to no avail.

Manchester United will now head to Sweden to play Galatasaray on July 30.

[Quotes via Daily Mail]