De Gea: It's great to be together again

Following positive covid cases at Manchester United, the Carrington training ground was closed down and two of our games were postponed. The players were given individual training programmes, which Ralf Rangnick confirmed the players completed at home, but this week the training ground opened again in preparation for our game against Newcastle.

Speaking to the club’s official site, David de Gea spoke about how glad he was to be back with his teammates.

It’s great. It’s good to have the whole team back to train properly altogether and then of course see they are all safe. They are back, they are all training, they are fine so it’s great to be together again.

We’ve been training hard, of course. It’s very intense, every training session, every moment with him [Rangnick] is intense. You have to give 100 per cent every time in training and in the games. Let’s see. It’s just the beginning, it’s been a couple of weeks, so let’s see in the future. The team is training with energy, with pace, and now we have to show that in big games.

United have been tighter at the back under Michael Carrick and Ralf Rangnick and De Gea has spoken about the importance of improving our defensive record.

I think the most important thing for us is to keep clean sheets. If we concede fewer goals, then we have top players up front who are going to score goals and win games.

Rangnick has also spoken to the press about what training has been like over the past week.

I spoke with most of our players who are either in isolation or positively tested, so I spoke with 16 or 17 players individually over the phone just to hear how they are and how they’re feeling. We did a lot of work in between together with my coaching staff who prepared some video footage and we have started to show this video footage to them on Tuesday, yesterday and also today (Thursday), and we will follow up on that tomorrow and on Sunday because it’s important that they really know what it is about and how we should play, to find the best possible balance of playing offensively and make use of the offensive players we have but at the same time be able to defend as a team and make sure that we get further clean sheets in the future.