After crashing out of the Europa League at the hands of Sevilla on Thursday night, Manchester United have seen their season suffer a major blow.
Despite racing to a 2-0 lead during their Europa League quarter-final’s first leg at Old Trafford last week, the return fixture in Spain last night saw the Red Devils put in arguably their worst performance of the season.
Having recently lost centre-back duo Raphael Varane and Lisandro Martinez through injury, Erik Ten Hag was forced to revert to an all-too-familiar defence featuring Victor Lindelof and Harry Maguire.
Losing their consistency, as well as seeing David De Gea drop a disastrous performance, United appeared well off the pace as Sevilla put three past them to win the tie 5-2 on aggregate.
And now with an important FA Cup semi-final against Brighton coming up on the weekend, as well as the race for the Premier League’s top four still open, Ten Hag will somehow need to re-focus his squad ahead of what could be a season-defining couple of weeks.
One player who has not featured since he injured his ankle at the start of March has been winger Alejandro Garnacho.
However, although the young Argentine will not be recovered in time to take on Roberto De Zerbi’s tricky Seagulls, according to TyC’s Gaston Edul, the 18-year-old is set to return to training on 1 May.
“10 days of recovery, on the first of May he will train,” Edul told his social media followers on Friday.
Should Garnacho return for United’s final few fixtures, his presence will offer Ten Hag a huge selection boost.
Although Marcus Rashford is the Dutchman’s preferred left-sided attacker, with Jadon Sancho continuing to underperform, Garnacho will almost certainly jump the queue and could be in line to help drive his team’s push for European qualification.