Today’s game has been overshadowed by the state of the surface at Beijing’s Bird’s Nest Stadium following torrential storms last week.
The teams were forced to re-schedule their training sessions yesterday to the nearby Olympic Sports Centre Stadium.
And United manager Mourinho and City boss Guardiola revealed they are worried that the pitch could cause damage to key men with the Premier League season starting in three weeks.
New signings like Henrikh Mkhitaryan, Eric Bailly and Nolito are all set to figure tonight as well as players like Sergio Aguero, David Silva, Yaya Toure, Juan Mata and rising star Marcus Rashford.
“If you ask me my objective for the match tomorrow I only have one: Take the players home safe without any kind of injury,” said Mourinho.
“Bad conditions for my players to train and bad conditions for my players to play are a problem for me.
“The pitch and the conditions of my players are more important than results in pre-season.
“City v United for me is Old Trafford or Etihad or a cup final at Wembley, not a friendly. It was a friendly before we knew the conditions. Now we know the conditions it’s maybe a double friendly. I just hope the players keep that balance and there are no problems.”
When asked what he he hoped to achieve from the game, Guardiola replied: “No injuries.”
Mourinho was already upset after some of his players did not reached the team hotel until around midnight on Saturday.
The delay came after one of the two planes carrying his squad from Shanghai to Beijing had been diverted to Tianjin airport because of bad weather.
Memphis was one of the players caught up in it and tweeted: “We are lost somewhere, we had to make a quick landing somewhere.”
Mourinho said: “We were supposed to fly in two different planes and share half of us in one plane and half of us in a second one.
“The ones in the first plane were lucky because the plane was great and we land safely and we were in the hotel in good conditions to have dinner.
“The second group was unlucky. The plane was not good, they had a storm and had to land for a couple of hours. They were going to come by bus but they got the plane and they arrived in the hotel to have dinner at 1am.”
