Tottenham Hotspur have been dealt yet another injury blow just one week before their Europa League final showdown against Manchester United.
Tottenham Hotspur and Manchester United will face off in Bilbao on May 21, with the winners set to be crowned Europa League champions and gain a place in next season’s Champions League.
Spurs will be without James Maddison and Lucas Bergvall.
While United saw French defender Leny Yoro sustain a foot injury during Sunday’s 2-0 home defeat against West Ham United – although head coach Ruben Amorim suggested “it could be a small thing”.
Right-back Diogo Dalot, suffered a muscle injury in last month’s 1-0 home defeat against Wolves and could miss the final.
Centre-back Matthijs de Ligt is recovering from an ankle injury and could be in contention to return to the squad ahead of United’s Premier League fixture against Chelsea at Stamford Bridge on Friday (May 16).
As for Spurs, Ange Postecoglou conceded that Dejan Kulusevski’s knee was “sore” during a UEFA media day on Monday (May 12).
Postecoglou said: “We'll see [about his fitness], he was a bit sore this morning with his knee. It looks like a knock at this stage, but we're going to let it settle for 24 hours, then assess it. But the initial thing was it's more of a knock than anything more significant.”
However, the MEN reports that sources “say the Swede's chances of recovery in time for next Wednesday's final have since reduced”.
The Spurs boss added: “We've obviously lost Madders and Bergvall in the last two weeks, so yesterday I only had three players back up and they were all going to play 45 minutes and you know, Sod's law, it's one of those that gets injured and look he is important, but you know, where we are right now they're all important. The thing with Deki was that he obviously missed a fair bit of football, but I could just sense he was getting back into the groove of things. I thought there's some real promising signs.
“At Bodo, he had to do a really disciplined job for us in terms of defensively, but he started to show some of that attacking creativity, and I thought he started the game really well yesterday. I thought our first 10 minutes were actually okay, and then he gets injured, so yeah, he's pretty important to us in the context of where the squad is at the moment, so fingers crossed he's OK.”