It has been recently shown that the competition between unscreened Coulomb and Fröhlich electron-phonon interactions can be described in terms of a short-range spin exchange Jp and an effective on-site interaction in the framework of the polaronic t-Jp- model. This model, that provides an explanation for high-temperature superconductivity in terms of Bose-Einstein condensation (BEC) of small and light bipolarons, is now studied as a charged Bose-Fermi mixture. Within this approximation, we show that a gap between bipolaron and unpaired polaron bands results in a strong suppression of low-temperature spin susceptibility, specific heat and tunnelling conductance, signalling the presence of a pseudogap regime in the normal state without any assumptions on pre-existing orders or broken symmetries in the normal state of the model.