Man City's Pep Guardiola made a mistake starting debutant Abdukodir Khusanov against Chelsea, says Jamie Redknapp

Pep Guardiola has backed Man City newcomer Abdukodir Khusanov to learn from a difficult debut against Chelsea, in which he was at fault for the Blues' third-minute opener, after Zone Sporty VIP pundit Jamie Redknapp said it was a mistake to start the defender.

Guardiola handed two of his three new players starts at the Etihad Stadium, with fellow new boy Omar Marmoush also handed a full debut while Victor Reis was an unused substitute.

The 20-year-old defender had a horrible start to life at City as he gifted Chelsea a goal and got booked inside the opening six minutes.

Khusanov, who cost City £33.6m - 18 months after Lens paid £84,000 to bring him from Belarusian side Energetik-BGU - speaks very little English and has only had a couple of training sessions with his new team-mates, and certainly looked like a man thrown in at the deep end before gradually settling down.

Khusanov started the second half but was replaced by John Stones in the 52nd minute, receiving an embrace from Guardiola and his team-mates.

"I said before the game I thought it was a risk to start him," said Redknapp.

"It's less of a risk for Marmoush. When you're playing as a centre-back, it's a lot more difficult, with the risk and the pressure that's on you.

"I think Pep, right now, will be saying, 'I shouldn't have played him.' He's 20 years of age, he's just come to the country, the team hasn't got any confidence as a defensive unit, you've got Matheus Nunes as you're right-back.

"It's not like the team is winning week in, week out. Last year, this would have been an easy job. But this season it's a lot more difficult. I think throwing him into an environment like this today was a mistake.

"After he made the initial mistakes, he did get better. But it was a really difficult day for him. I hope it doesn't damage him long-term. Hopefully he will learn from it and become a stronger and better player.

"Those first 15 or 20 minutes were a tough watch. I felt sorry for him."

Guardiola admitted his new defender had a tough debut but feels he'll become a better player for it in the longer-term.

He said: "He doesn't speak English so I didn't speak with him! He will be fine.

"He only had one or two training sessions. I didn't want to push John [Stones] coming from injuries. I need him for Wednesday [against Club Brugge in City's crucial Champions League match].

"He will learn. He is aware of what happened. How the players were with him was massively important. Any player can make a mistake. If after that you feel alone, it's even tougher.

"He is so young. He has come for many years. He will learn."

Zone Sporty VIP' Gary Neville said:

"I said I really felt for him because he's a young defender. Most defenders, 90 per cent of us play our careers not really enjoying it that much, knowing that we're going to go out on the pitch and the best that we can hope is that we're not being talked about.

"That's success because you want the glory to be with your strikers, your midfield players, the ones who score the goals and there are some exceptions obviously to that nowadays where some of the defenders including Gvardiol [who] goes forward and scores goals.

"But you know you're really sort of building a consistency and an idea of not making errors. In Khusanov's first game you're asking yourself after three or four minutes 'how long will this last?' It was a brutal start.

"Obviously he's going to have to develop and build himself - he's got a long career ahead of him but it could have been so much worse for him. If you think about the first three minutes - if you just said at that point that the ending would be that he would get to maybe 52, 53 minutes and the team would win, I think he'd have absolutely snapped your hand off because he was trembling at one point.

"What was nice was that actually when he came off there were a lot of players went over to him the bench en masse. There was probably 20 on the bench and 15 behind there. They were clapping him, they over clapped him, almost exaggerated the clapping.

"Pep Guardiola gave him a hug and at the end of the game there are a few players when I was looking down who went over to him and hugged him and said 'look, we won, well done'. And that's the sort of thing that you want."

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