28 December 2020

Nuno Espirito Santo knows recovery time is precious ahead of Old Trafford trip

28 December 2020

Wolves boss Nuno Espirito Santo will assess his players before seeing who will be available for their game at Manchester United on Tuesday.

Wolves were the last team in action during the Boxing Day weekend, playing Tottenham on Sunday night, and they are back in action at Old Trafford 48 hours later.

United kicked off the festive programme with a lunchtime kick-off on Saturday, meaning it will be a tough task for the Black Country club.

Nuno said: “It’s very hard. The schedule is very demanding on everybody. Not much time to recover, but this is what we do now.

“In the cycle, Sunday is the moment to recover well. Monday prepare the game and compete at Old Trafford.

“It’s going to be very tough, but the signs are good. Let’s see the assessment of the players and we’ll decide who we’re going to start with.

“Immediately after the game we started the process of recovering. Monday the same, then you have a good meeting and compete.

“What we hold on is our foundation, our idea, the way we do things, how we want to do things and we rely on our players to develop the tasks on the pitch. From there on it’s a game, anything can happen.

“Confidence comes from the way you prepare for the game, the way you prepare to compete, and we are confident to say we want to compete.

“Against all the opponents, we have the same idea, compete in every moment of the game. For us, there’s no different in opponents, we’re going to face a very tough team.”

Wolves head to Old Trafford to face a side who are in impressive form, unbeaten in their last eight Premier League games.

Nuno says it is too early to say whether United are title challengers.

“It’s very early,” he added. “Not only early in the competition, but at the same time so unpredictable.

“There’s no result that we can predict, anything can happen with any team. I look at the opponent.

“One thing I know for sure is every game in the Premier League is very tough. There’s no team you can relax on. Very good work by Ole [Gunnar Solskjaer], very tough squad, a very tough game ahead of us.”

Leander Dendoncker and Willy Boly both missed the 1-1 draw with Spurs and are not expected to recover, joining Raul Jimenez and Jonny on the sidelines.

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