Intrigue over Manchester United\u2019s poor injury record this season deepened on Friday night when it emerged that their respected and long-serving fitness coach Tony Strudwick is no longer involved in key first team duties.<\/p>\n
United manager Louis van Gaal revealed on Friday that he has nine players missing injured ahead of Saturday’s visit of West Ham United in the Barclays Premier League. Van Gaal has described the crisis as the worst he has ever known.<\/p>\n
Now it has emerged that first team fitness expert Strudwick has been moved from his usual role to a job looking after the physical development of the club\u2019s younger players. It is understood that Van Gaal\u2019s long serving fitness guru Jos van Dijk is now in control of fitness planning and programming for the club\u2019s elite stars.<\/p>\n
Strudwick was in charge of things on the club\u2019s pre-season tour of America and was regularly seen working with Wayne Rooney and the rest of the first team on the trip.<\/p>\n
Since then, though, the 42-year-old has been less visible and sources at Old Trafford confirmed last night that things had changed earlier in the season. Strudwick\u2019s only involvement with the first team now is some warm up drills before training and some strength work.<\/p>\n
He no longer has any involvement with the crucial task of designing and planning training, the vital role he had fulfilled since joining from Blackburn Rovers in 2007.<\/p>\n
There is no suggestion that the decision to move Strudwick is any reflection on his work, rather that Van Gaal \u2013 in common with many managers \u2013 merely wished to work with his own man.<\/p>\n
However Van Gaal\u2019s decision represents a risk as not only is Strudwick considered talented enough and experienced enough to work for the FA with Roy Hodgson and the England squad, he is liked, trusted and respected by all of the club\u2019s senior players.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
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Intrigue over Manchester United\u2019s poor injury record this season deepened on Friday night when it emerged that their respected and long-serving fitness coach Tony Strudwick is no longer involved in key first team duties. United manager Louis van Gaal revealed on Friday that he has nine players missing injured ahead of Saturday’s visit of West […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4836,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[60,80],"tags":[37],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/africanexaminer.com\/sports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4834"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/africanexaminer.com\/sports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/africanexaminer.com\/sports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/africanexaminer.com\/sports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/africanexaminer.com\/sports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4834"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/africanexaminer.com\/sports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4834\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4837,"href":"http:\/\/africanexaminer.com\/sports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4834\/revisions\/4837"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/africanexaminer.com\/sports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4836"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/africanexaminer.com\/sports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4834"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/africanexaminer.com\/sports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4834"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/africanexaminer.com\/sports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4834"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}