Manchester United trio Jesse Lingard, Nemanja Matic, and Antonio Valencia will miss the Red Devils’ trip to Brighton this weekend. The players have been suffering from injury and will be held out of the Manchester United squad for their second match of the Premier League season.
Manchester United trio to miss Brighton fixture this weekend
All three players have returned to training, but they won’t have enough time to gain fitness ahead of Sunday’s match at the Amex Stadium.
Valencia has been suffering from a calf injury sustained during the club’s summer tour of North America. Matic is still recovering from surgery after picking up an injury at the World Cup while playing for Serbia. Meanwhile, Lingard is still recovering from the World Cup where he helped England to the semifinals.
Manager Jose Mourinho addressed the Manchester United trio’s omission from this weekend’s trip to Brighton in his weekly press conference.
Lingard, Matic, and Valencia have been training with the team since yesterday [Thursday],
Mourinho said. [They are] fully fit but not yet [ready] to play or even to be selected, I think, and that’s it.
The news that the Manchester United trio won’t play adds to the injured and missing list of players at the club. Summer signing Diogo Dalot, Sergio Romero, Marco Rojo, and Ander Herrera will also be out of action this weekend.
Of course, some of the boys are in a better condition because before Leicester they trained just three days and after this long, good working week, normally they are in a better condition,
Mourinho explained.
Although Manchester United are the favourites, they could face difficulty from Brighton due to their injury list.
Looking to the match, I think the best way to look at it is to remember that three months ago we lost 1-0 there, ” Mourinho said.
Chris [Hughton] is a great coach. Good players, good team, beautiful stadium, but difficult to play. They know how to play and they’ve kept the same team, they bought a few new players. I think the style is the same and the fact that they lost the first match [against Watford], obviously they are working for a reaction, working to improve their game, so a difficult match for us, but we are confident.
The training was really, really good all week and we go to win, obviously. That is our main objective.