Team News: Several Manchester United players returned to training ahead of Brighton clash
According to The Athletic (Subscription Required), Several Manchester United players have returned to training ahead of the clash against Brighton and Hove Albion in the Premier League. The match is set to take place on Saturday if it does not get postponed due to the Covid outbreak.
Earlier, Man United had their match against Brentford postponed due to positive cases getting identified ahead of the fixture. The first team facilities at Carrington were closed to minimise the spread on Tuesday in order to gain control over the situation. The squad returned to training on Wednesday as they prepare for the game against Brighton.
Graham Potter revealed his team had three or four cases inside their camp, which put the clash further in doubt. The Red Devils are constantly in contact with the Premier League to discuss the Covid situation within the club. Lateral flow and PCR tests are carried out to find out new cases by testing people who enter the club.
According to Samuel Luckhurst, the Chief Manchester United writer for the Manchester Evening News, a minimum of 17 first-team players in total would be available during the weekend, having been accounted for at the club today. That will be a sigh of relief to the Manchester club if the league does decide that the match should happen as usual.
What next?
We would need to be very adept at finding and reducing the possibility of new cases to prevent further damage to the first team. Since no tests provide 100 percent accuracy, we must have confirmation checks following it to minimise the probability of a false-positive test.
More updates would soon follow since we are apparently in discussion with the league over how things are faring at our end. Our opponents also have positive cases within their camp and, we should keep an eye out on whether it gets worse over there as well- hopefully it doesn’t, though. Ideally, we would want the game to be played, but it should not come by putting the well-being of the people involved at risk.
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If the clash against Potter’s team does get postponed, we will lose the match sharpness that we have been building under Ralf Rangnick. Some may also be affected by a reduction in their fitness due to the facilities getting closed on Tuesday. We hope that the situation is solved as soon as possible to prevent any further damage to the team.
While it isn’t the most important thing right now given the Covid outbreak, we still wouldn’t want to have a lot of postponed fixtures to make our fixture list even denser later on this season.