Ruben Amorim has provided a brief update on the state of his Manchester United squad, ahead of Monday’s meeting with Bournemouth at Old Trafford.
The mood around Carrington has been positive this week, following the 4-1 victory at Wolves, and the Reds are looking to make further progress when the south-coast club come to town, for what is our final home match before Christmas.
United will have to cope without central defenders Matthijs de Ligt and Harry Maguire, as they are still missing with injury.
Benjamin Sesko, meanwhile, has been suffering with illness this week and will have to be assessed before the decision is made over whether or not he can be involved.
“Maguire is out, De Ligt is out. Ben we have to see,”
said Amorim.
“We have to see if he’s available. He had some [food] poisoning, but we’ll see. Let’s wait.
“We have two trainings still. The other two are out, Benjamin we will assess.”
Amorim later expanded on the nature of De Ligt’s injury, after he sat out of the draw against West Ham and Monday’s win at Molineux.
“I think he has something in his back, I don’t know for sure,”
he said.
“Sometimes you see it’s not a big injury because he finished the game quite well against Crystal Palace, but he has some pain.
”You sometimes think it will be solved during this week, but sometimes he feels a little bit of pain and we have to be a little careful with that.“
The boss went on to add that a departure date for the three players involved in the Africa Cup of Nations cannot yet be confirmed, so United are preparing for the game with Amad, Noussair Mazraoui and Bryan Mbeumo.
“I expect today to have a decision or maybe tomorrow but we are waiting until the last moment to have all the players available, to choose the best team to start the game,”
he added.
BOURNEMOUTH TEAM NEWS
Cherries boss Andoni Iraola is seeking his third straight win at Old Trafford, but has injury concerns in defence.
Marcos Senesi “finished with cramps”
during the goalless draw with Chelsea and his training workload is being managed, although the defender is “optimistic” about being involved on Monday.
Young Serbian defender Veljko Milosavljevic has been ruled out for a couple of months due to a knee injury.
“We have to be careful with them in their recoveries,” Iraola said of his young players. “Obviously we need them, but we haven't signed them just for this season - we've signed them for a lot of seasons, hopefully.
“So we have to take care of them and make proper recoveries with them.”
Lewis Cook is seeing out his three-match suspension, for the red card he received against Sunderland, while Scotland duo Ryan Christie and Ben Gannon-Doak remain sidelined.