Amorim: Chido can start against former club Arsenal

Manchester United take on Arsenal in the Premier League this weekend, having knocked the London club out of the FA Cup earlier this year at the Emirates.

With United in the midst of a terrible injury crisis, not managing to fill the bench in recent weeks, Ruben Amorim has spoken about his uncertainty over whether Ugarte or Maguire will be fit in time for Arsenal, but confirmed that any fit player, including Chido Obi, will be in contention.

I don’t know, I don’t know. We need to survive Sunday. The team was so tired in the last 20 minutes. We have to prepare for Sunday and then think about this important game in our season on Thursday [the second leg against Real Sociedad] but, in this moment, I don’t know.

Everybody can start. If they are training tomorrow [Friday], if they played today [Thursday], they can be ready. Chido is on the list, so he can play.

United’s U-18s knocked Arsenal out of the FA Youth Cup last week but Obi didn’t feature against his former club because he was in the first team squad for the Fulham game.

Arteta spoke about what a disappointment it was that Obi, as well as Ayden Heaven, chose to leave Arsenal’s academy to join United.

Obviously, when a player decides that the best pathway for him is to leave, there’s not much you can do. Very unfortunate because we want to keep our players from the academy and to be very successful with the first team. But in that case, with Ayden, we weren’t able to do that. To persuade a player to stay a player has to be willing to be with us and commit to us and I don’t know specifically, both parties will feel very different about it. The reality is that he has decided to move and we have moved on from that. Massive goal threat, an attitude and love to be inside the box and a capacity to score in many different ways. That was him.