Manchester City boss Manuel Pellegrini said the lack of options in his squad had been costly in Saturday's 2-0 defeat at Stoke.
City, who were without several players including Sergio Aguero, Yaya Toure, Vincent Kompany and Pablo Zabaleta due to injury, were well beaten at the Britannia Stadium.
Marko Arnautovic opened the scoring on seven minutes following excellent work from Xherdan Shaqiri and the same pair combined to make it 2-0 soon afterwards.
Both Arnautovic and Shaqiri had clear-cut chances to extend Stoke's advantage on a dismal day for City, and Pellegrini said his players had shown clear signs of fatigue.
"On the positive side we are still in all four competitions, but today we didn't have the legs to defend as we needed to or attack in the way we liked and we didn't create many chances," Pellegrini said.
"We have had to play the same 12 or 15 players for most of the season, but the fault is the whole team's because we defend as a team and we attack as a team and we didn't do either well today.
"I'm worried by the first 20 minutes of the game against Stoke and I'm worried going forward about the way we played the ball in the opposition box.
"We don't have a priority to get any one player back in the team in particular -- we have five or six key injuries and I don't think we will have any of them back this week."
City were able to welcome goalkeeper Joe Hart and David Silva back into the starting lineup for the game but also saw Fernando leave the pitch with an injury.
Hart said after the match that City could not make excuses for their performances, even if the windy conditions at the Britannia Stadium had made life difficult.
"It was a disappointing start and we couldn't recover from it," he said. "We didn't play well.
"Conditions were tough but that's English football. I said before the game: no one would be able to walk of the pitch with an excuse.
"It's not like the wind got up four seconds before kick-off -- we knew what we were coming into and Stoke knew what they were coming in to.
"A few of the lads are feeling it from the amount of games we're playing but that's not an excuse.
"They played better than us and deserved to beat us."