Mourinho expects arm injury to rule out Son for season

Tottenham head coach Jose Mourinho does not expect Son Heung-min to play again this season.

The South Korea international has undergone surgery on a broken arm suffered in Sunday’s 3-2 win against Aston Villa, where he scored two goals.

The club have said that he will be out for a “number of weeks” but Mourinho is much more pessimistic.

It is a massive blow to Spurs – who could be without Harry Kane for the rest of the season – given the fact Son has scored six goals in the last five games.

Mourinho described the news as heartbreaking and says that he must now “play without a striker”.

“I don’t count on him again this season,” he said ahead of tonight’s Champions League tie with RB Leipzig .

“If he plays two or three games then it’s because he (the press officer) is very optimistic, but I’m not counting on him.

“Yesterday the bad news – the first thing was to break our hearts and the second thing was to break our team.

“But we have to recover from broken hearts and we have to fight with the team we have.”

The timing could not be worse for Spurs given they are entering a possible season-defining period, with the two-legged Champions League tie with the Bundesliga side and games against topfour rivals Chelsea, Wolves and Manchester United in the next four weeks.

Mourinho has no outand-out striker to call on, having declared academy prospect Troy Parrott not ready, meaning options are limited to playing Lucas Moura, Dele Alli or Steven Bergwijn.

“The situation couldn’t be worse in terms of options,” Mourinho said. “I think that’s a very, very, very obvious situation. There is nothing that you can do.

“You are going to play with the players we have available. The players are going to give absolutely everything which is what they are doing. In some periods I was worried about not having attacking options on the bench.

“Now I don’t have attacking options on the pitch.

“So again, analogies apart, are we going to give up or are we going to fight the way we can? We are going to fight the way we can.”

Spurs made it to last season’s Champions League final through a period of adversity and Mourinho hopes Leipzig underestimate them at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium tonight.

“I’m not going to give up and probably opponents, they are thinking, ‘Wow, now is the time to kill them’,” he said.

“I understand why they think that way but we are going to give everything and I don’t think it’s going to be easy for Leipzig to play against us.

“I don’t think it will be easy for them.”

Son Heung-min at half-time in the Villa game.