It’s been a disastrous preseason for Manchester United, as the team’s injuries and unavailabilities continue to pile up. At the same time, United are still waiting on the return of most of their key players, who are still on post World Cup break.
On top of all that, the summer transfer window is going very poorly for United, and manager Jose Mourinho has consistently been vocal about all that has gone awry. While it is still only preseason, the results of these friendlies have been quite ugly.
Perhaps the ugliest came yesterday, when United were dominated by arch-rivals Liverpool in a 4-1 loss at Michigan Stadium. Following the International Champions Cup blowout, Mourinho had an expectedly eventful news conference.
After venting his frustrations with incomplete transfer business, Mourinho rejected the idea that the transfer market would bring reinforcements.
“This is nothing to do with reinforcements,” he said in a news conference at the big house.
“The reinforcement is Pogba, Fellaini, Lindelof, Rashford, Lingard, Matic, Valencia — these are reinforcements. This is not our team, not our squad. We start the game with almost half of the players [who] aren’t going to belong to our squad. This is not our squad.
“Reinforcements, you are saying players I’d like to buy, add to the squad. That is another thing, but this is not even 30 percent of my squad, so don’t look to this that way.”
In addition to all the players mentioned by Mourinho, Romelu Lukaku, Marcos Rojo, Ashley Young and Phil Jones have all also not yet returned to training.
Midfielder Nemanja Matic returned to training, but he’s now recovering from surgery that was required to treat an injury he suffered this summer. He is now a doubt for the Premier League season opener against Leicester City. Mourinho gave the following update yesterday:
“He came from [the] World Cup with an injury, and the time he had to rest in the holiday was not enough to resolve the problem.”
“He went to see a top world specialist in relation to these kinds of injuries, and he didn’t leave the clinic. He had immediate surgery not to lose more time, so no Matic.”
Joining Matic on the list of current unavailables are Antonio Valencia (suffered a calf injury last week, out for the rest of the preseason), new signing Diogo Dalot (ruled out until September), Anthony Martial (flew home for the birth of his son), Sergio Romero (long term injury), Luke Shaw (another fresh injury) and Chris Smalling (suffered a minor injury in pregame warm-ups on Saturday).
Paul M. Banks runs The Sports Bank.net and TheBank.News, which is partnered with News Now. Banks, a former writer for NBC Chicago.com and Chicago Tribune.com, is currently a regular contributor to SB Nation, WGN CLTV and Chicago Now.
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