Newcastle United still have plenty of time before their next match against Crystal Palace, which is giving several players some good time to recover.
The players who aren’t on international duty will be hard at work at the Benton training ground with Eddie Howe, something that has been quite rare this season, given the sheer number of fixtures Newcastle have been involved in.
Even when the internationals return to the North East, they will have a week or so to train with the club, which should give Howe some time to work on new ideas and hopefully come up with some answers on what to do with the likes of Nick Woltemade for the run-in.
Meanwhile, players like Lewis Miley and Fabian Schar get more time to recover without missing any more games.
Bruno Guimaraes can also count himself as part of that little group after his hamstring injury and then his recovery setback due to coming down with mumps.
The Toon skipper returned to Brazil for his recovery from his hamstring injury, but made it back to Newcastle in time to join the lads in Barcelona to watch from the stands. Unfortunately, shortly after returning home again, Bruno was diagnosed with mumps and told to isolate for five days.
We had wondered what it would do to his potential comeback date, whether it would push back his return, but Guimaraes posted a hint on his Instagram reels showing an image of him in action with ‘Not long now’ as the caption.
This obviously doesn’t mean that Bruno will be available for the game against Crystal Palace on 12th April, but we can take it as a pretty good sign.
We have learned to not take comeback dates so literally, especially after how many Lewis Miley has had and missed.
Dare we expect tos ee the 19-year-old involved against Palace? Surely he has to be ready now. We know he’s back in full training, so there shouldn’t be anything stopping him from making an appearance.