Aston Villa captain Jack Grealish has told Prince William he hopes to be back from injury in the next ‘week or 10 days’, ahead of their match against Manchester United.
Ole Gunnar Solskjaer 's side travel to Villa Park on Sunday after their midweek exploits in the Europa League semi-final second leg against AS Roma.
With United 6-2 up on aggregate, they head to Rome with a sizeable lead, which could allow Solskjaer to rotate his squad for their Premier League clash with Aston Villa.
They'll be boosted in their hopes of a win by the continued absence of Grealish, who has missed the last 11 Premier League games since suffering the problem in training in February.
The Duke of Cambridge was at Villa’s training ground on Tuesday to open the club’s new state-of-the-art high-performance centre and asked Grealish for an update on his injury, to which he replied: “I haven’t actually got a date yet but I’m going to London on Thursday. I’m hoping a week or 10 days.”
Speaking ahead of Villa’s 2-1 win at Everton, manager Dean Smith said Villa were taking a cautious approach to Grealish’s recovery after the England international suffered a setback last month.
“The scan has come back and it's shown a positive scan,” Smith said. “We're loading him gradually and we're obviously a little bit tentative after the last time. He's doing gradual loading.
“He's working on his own at the moment. As I say, it's going to be a gradual loading. It's a loading stress injury so we can't rush him.
"I think because of the last time he broke down a bit so we're a little tentative so will probably want to take a different approach to last time. I expect him to be training with us this week.”
