Injury-hit Man United ‘in trouble’
A difficult pre-season is threatening to lurch into a farce for Manchester United, as manager Jose Mourinho heads into their final game in the United States against European champions Real Madrid without as many as 17 senior players.
United head for the humidity and tropical storms of Miami with dark clouds hovering over them and a manager whose mood flicks between exasperated and foreboding. Mourinho has been on a damage-limitation exercise for several days, claiming after a heavy 4-1 defeat by Liverpool in Michigan that they are merely trying to prevent “ugly results” because of how weak the teams he can put out have become.
Already deprived of more than half of his first-choice starting XI because of World Cup commitments, injuries have now decimated his squad and Mourinho is worried as he moves towards the start of the serious business of a new domestic campaign.
It is difficult not to feel some sympathy for the Portuguese, who was already concerned about the lack of preparation time, so to lose players such as Antonio Valencia and Nemanja Matic to injuries that will sideline them for several weeks has been a disaster. United look in disarray less than two weeks before the start of the English Premier League campaign, with Mourinho also painting a gloomy picture of their recruitment process, a source of tension that will not be easy to resolve, given there are only 11 days left in this transfer window and Leicester City are determined not to sell United’s top transfer target, centre-back Harry Maguire. Although international players such as Paul Pogba, Romelu Lukaku and David de Gea will be available for their first game against Leicester on August 10 at Old Trafford, they will not have played a game for three weeks and may well not have trained properly, either.
“I just hope the boys [who are] on deserved holidays, take care of themselves a little bit,” Mourinho said after the second-half collapse against Liverpool. “And some want to do what [Marcus] Rashford and [Phil] Jones do, which is to be back a little bit earlier to try because, for the beginning of the season, we are going to be in trouble.”
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