Newcastle United manager Rafael Benitez has provided an injury update on sidelined Magpies duo Sean Longstaff and Florian Lejeune.
Both players are out of action at the moment, a big blow to Benitez’s team considering how well they have been playing this season. However, the manager provided the club’s supporters with a boost on Thursday.
“I saw Longstaff today, he is walking around and that is good news,” Benitez said at his pre match press conference, as per The Chronicle. “The rest of the players are fine.
“Florian Lejeune had the operation. Everything has gone well and as we were expecting. The time scale is that we will see how he is progressing in a couple of months and see how long he will take. We sent him to Rome to a specialist and he did a great job. He did a great job with the other knee. He has already started his rehabilitation so hopefully it will be quite quick.”
OPINION
This is terrific news from a Newcastle fan’s perspective. Longstaff and Lejeune have been two of the team’s best players since coming into the side around the turn of the year, so to hear that their respective recoveries are going well at this stage is tremendously positive. Longstaff is obviously further along in his recovery and is coming off a less serious injury, but the fact that he is walking around is a good thing in and of itself. Lejeune is obviously in the early stages of his comeback, having only picked up the problem against Crystal Palace recently. His is a more serious setback and is one that is going to take a fair bit of time to recover from. However, that was the prognosis last pre season when he went down injured and he made a much quicker than expected recovery that time. So perhaps he’ll do that again here, but we shouldn’t put too much pressure on either of these players at this point.
