Why Shaw is happy to see Ighalo remain a Red

We’re training really hard now, and when you get home you feel like it’s time to rest but obviously that’s not so simple in our house. Reign’s growing up quickly and as soon as I get in I’m straight into spending my time with him and my girlfriend.

I wouldn’t change that quality time with them for anything, and this week I’m aiming to start season four of Queen of the South, which I’m really looking forward to. As soon as he’s down in bed, we’ll be straight on that.

We’ve already had some really good news at United this week with Odion extending his contract. All the players are really happy for him. Obviously his situation was up in the air and we try not to talk about that kind of thing at training but we’re just so happy for him.

Before he arrived, a few people outside the club weren’t too sure what he was going to bring to the club, but he’s shown everyone because he’s brought goals and a different style to our other strikers.

He’s earned and deserved the chance to stay here longer. He brings happiness and a smile to the place. He’s great in training but he’s also been really important at times during games and scored some great goals. Now that everything’s sorted, hopefully he can relax now and settle back into doing what he was doing before football stopped.

Training is going really well for us all. I think you can see from the videos that have been going out that everyone’s looking very sharp, very fit and obviously we’re all very keen to get back to the games. The first few days back were about returning to normality, getting used to the ball again, playing games and getting a bit of fitness work in, but now we’ve got a good base and we can start doing a bit more work that the manager and the coaches want to do around the way we play and the system we’ll be working on.

We’ve been doing a bit more tactical work to get our principles in for what the manager wants. The lads are engaging in that well and understanding more and more what the gaffer wants. We’ve got a good couple of weeks now to work on what we’re going to be doing as a team.

Our training games have been so enjoyable after such a long wait. It was nice to come to the training ground, get set up on our bikes and from there we could see that there was a game set out on the pitch. It was just such a nice feeling to see a proper game marked out and we’ve had quite a lot of competitive games so far.

It’s great to see that spirit among the lads. I’ve been quite lucky, to be fair. I think I’ve been on the winning team every day bar one since we’ve been playing games again.

The last time we played an actual competitive game was against LASK in Austria, when obviously there were no supporters in the ground, and I suppose that was sort of a trial run for how things will be here when we get back to playing in the Premier League.

For me, fans are first and foremost; the atmosphere they make is what football is all about and we’re definitely going to miss having them at our games, both at a packed Old Trafford and the amazing away support that follows us everywhere.

We love our fans and we’ll miss them, but it’s far more important that we don’t bring them back too early in the current climate. We’ll have to create our own atmosphere on the pitch through the people we’ve got on the sidelines, and it’s useful that we’ve got a couple of weeks now to get it into our heads that it’s going to be so different to what we’re used to. We need to be ready for it. We’ve had that taste of it already against LASK and we can use that to our advantage.

Take care of each other and stay safe.

Luke.

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