Gareth Southgate's England squad was this morning given a clean bill of health following a round of coronavirus tests yesterday.
An outbreak of cases across the Premier League had threatened Southgate’s plans for the upcoming Nations League qualifiers, but it is thought no current members of the squad returned positive samples.
The news will come as a relief to Southgate, who has already been forced to twice rejig his squad. Yesterday, he handed a first call-up to Aston Villa’s Jack Grealish (above) after Marcus Rashford and Harry Winks withdrew for the fixtures against Iceland and Denmark on Saturday and next Tuesday.
It followed first senior call-ups for Wolves centre-half Conor Coady and Arsenal’s Ainsley Maitland-Niles on Saturday.
Rashford, who has been nursing an ankle problem, said the games would “come a little too soon” for him, while Winks was withdrawn without explanation after missing Tottenham’s friendlies on Friday and Saturday.
Grealish, 23, was a member of Southgate’s 2016 Toulon Tournament-winning Under-21 squad, but the manager has previously resisted a senior call-up for the Villa captain.
Coady was a replacement for Harry Maguire, who was removed from the squad last week after his trial on the Greek island of Syros.
Maitland-Niles’s call-up follows his man-of-the-match display in Saturday’s Community Shield win, which has also prompted Arsenal to rethink their plans to sell the 23-year-old.
