José Mourinho has confirmed that Anthony Martial will miss Manchester United’s clash against Leicester City in the Premier League on Saturday.
The Frenchman suffered a clash of heads with Watford’s Daryl Janmaat during United’s defeat at Vicarage Road last weekend and was taken off on the stroke of half-time with a suspected concussion.
Martial missed the Reds’ EFL Cup third round victory against League One side Northampton Town in midweek and despite returning to training on Friday, the United manager has said that the 20-year-old will not play against the Foxes at Old Trafford due to a “contusion in the calf and in the ankle area”.
The only other confirmed absentee for the Reds is Phil Jones, who continues to recover from a medial knee ligament problem he suffered earlier this month in training.
Mourinho was keen to stress that his United side was a work in progress in his pre-match interview with MUTV, stating that he had taken some positives from United’s performances despite a three-match losing streak recently.
He said:
Of course [it is still a work in progress]. This is a process of years, not a process even of months. But you can change things and improve things like I think we have done. We’ve played a few matches already where you could feel the differences in the style, differences in the approach and differences in the intensity.
Even in the difficult week where we had bad results and defeats, in these matches we saw, not with consistency, a few very interesting things. For example, the way we played in the second half against Manchester City and Watford. In every match, we try to improve but, without the results, it’s difficult to persuade people that we are in a process.
