Nani out for a month

As if to compound an already miserable 7 days, word has emerged from OT that the injury sustained by Nani on Sunday will keep him out for a month. Nani has singlehandedly won us games this season that we had no business winning and has also carved out goals from seemingly impossible angles. In short, he’s been a poor man’s Ronaldo and we’ve benefited tremendously from it especially in light of the overall poor production and performance from the rest of our midfield.

After crashing to 2 morale-hurting defeats against Chelsea and Liverpool, what we need is to start picking up wins again so that we can get back on track. Nani’s absence however, will leave us that much weaker and even more reliant on Rooney, Berba and Chicharito to come up with moments of magic. As has been mentioned repeatedly throughout the season, we can no longer rely on our midfielders to create scoring opportunities the way a Fabregas or Modric would. After the display on Sunday, we should probably just be content to not put out a midfield combination that gets torn to shreds and is unable to track opposition midfielders when called upon to do defensives duties.

The one piece of good news however is the rumor that Valencia is recovering very quickly and is close to rejoining the first team. It’s highly unlikely that he’ll be able to return immediately at the high level that Nani was playing at. Yet, a semi fit Valencia who will by default, get the minutes needed to play himself back into full fitness, will be a step up from most of the other options we currently have in the squad to cover for Nani’s absence. Are we honestly going to risk playing Bebe out on the right as we enter the final few months of the season? I would certainly hope not.

The other thing we can remain positive about is that Nani’s absence won’t cause him to miss our biggest remaining league clashes against Chelsea and Arsenal. Both those games are in the first week of May and Nani should be back and fully fit by that point.

Now, we just need to figure out who we can stick out on the right for the upcoming Arsenal and Marseille games.

SAF must surely regret not recalling Cleverley in the January window…

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Category: Manchester United, Nani, injuries