United’s head physio Ross Goodwin joined the club in the summer, taking over from long-serving physio Neil Dalton, and he admitted today that it had been very strange to go through the process of applying for his new job in what were a set of very unique circumstances.
“It’s the first time I’ve ever done an interview by Zoom!” he told us. “It was ok though because I got to speak to the manager about what he wants, and I knew that I wanted to be part of that straight away.
“The location is obviously fantastic for me, being local, and I honestly didn’t think Dolly would ever leave. As soon as I heard he was I knew it was something I wanted to look at.”
With more to come from Ross in later interviews, we focused first on an injury update.
On Preston loanee Ethan Walker, he said: “Ethan [Walker] fell last week at the Sunderland game and put his shoulder out. He’s had it previously at Preston, and he’s now gone back to Preston before he goes for surgery this weekend.
“He’s out for the foreseeable. You’re probably looking at three months. He’s got instability in his shoulder, he needs to stabilise it or it will end up as a long-term problem. He dislocated it a year ago and dislocated again on Tuesday, and he’s a young boy so if it doesn’t get fixed now he’s going to have problems forever, basically.”
“Brennan is coming on alright,” he continued. “He’s six weeks along now, which is probably coming up for halfway. He’s looking at the end of December, but everything is progressing well. It was a really bad hamstring before the start of the season which is just one of those things. Covid has probably played a part, it was just one of those freak incidents.
“Omari [Patrick] felt his hammy early in pre-season before he came back then did another part of his hammy. He got himself fit, but he’s now done the other leg, we’re hoping he’s not too far away. The word of the specialist was positive, so we’re hoping he’ll be back in the next couple of weeks.
“He’ll go back to see the specialist then get the OK to get back involved. With boys like Omari, his whole game is explosion. You’re putting a hammy at a bigger risk every time he goes to accelerate, especially early in the season. Those injuries are part and parcel of football. You can do as much as you can to prevent it but sometimes it happens.”
“With Gime [Toure] he’s just picking up little niggles. He’s the type of player who is going to pick up dead legs and things like that. He took a dead leg one week, then another last week. Missing the Sunderland game was more a precaution than anything, there’s no long-term issues.”
“Josh [Dixon] had the whole pre-season and was feeling good, but he had his strength test which was down a little bit on where it should have been. He spent the next few weeks building up, then he got a little niggle about a month ago. He’s back running, and he’s been doing some ball work today. Hopefully he’s not far away, but he needs games, that’s probably his biggest downfall just now, the lack of game time he’s had in the last two years.”