For Alexis Sanchez, the nightmare stint at Manchester United just continues to worsen. For United, the current injury crisis shows no signs of improvement as a critical week commences.
Sanchez, who has missed significant time due to injury, and struggled with very poor form when healthy since moving over from Arsenal in January of 2018, may have suffered knee ligament damage yesterday in the club’s come from behind win over Southampton.
The Chilean was seen limping significantly when he left Old Trafford on Saturday.
United interim boss Ole Gunnar Solksjaer said in post game that the specific extent of the damage isn’t known at this time, but they fear this latest set back for Alexis Sanchez could be quite serious.
“We haven’t checked too much. It might be the ligament, it’s a bad knock on his knee,” Solskjaer said.
“We’ll do a scan but we don’t know until we’ve done the scan. We’re playing against one of the best teams in Europe with some absolute quality players but who knows, this has happened before.”
United play at Paris Saint-Germain Wednesday night in the second leg of their UEFA Champions League round of 16 tie. The Red Devils enter the contest down 2-0 on aggregate and missing a large number of key players. They will also be without star man Paul Pogba who is suspended due to the red card he picked up in the first leg.
Solskjaer refuses to concede defeat in this tie.
“We have to do it away from home,” he added. “We’re confident away from home if we’re in the game with 10 minutes to go — who knows?”
It looks highly unlikely that Alexis Sanchez will get to face his former team, Arsenal, this weekend in Premier League play. If indeed he suffered knee ligament damage, then it would probably be a season ending injury given how there are only a couple months and change left.
Paul M. Banks runs The Sports Bank.net, which is partnered with News Now. Banks, a former writer for NBC Chicago.com and Chicago Tribune.com, regularly appears as a guest pundit on WGN CLTV and co-hosts the “Let’s Get Weird, Sports” podcast on SB Nation.
He also contributes sociopolitical essays to Chicago Now. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram. The content of his cat’s Instagram account is unquestionably superior to his.