The Athletic F.C.

This is Talk the Devils, the Athletic Show, dedicated to Manchester United.

Coming up, there's not long to wait now, and we are going to preview Sunday's Manchester Derby on today's show.

We'll take a look at how Ruben Amarin and his team may approach the match at the Etiad Stadium

and also debate what's going to happen with the goalkeepers, because there's question marks at at both ends of the pitch and that could have a big say in the game as well. There's lots of detail from the international break in there as you'd expect. It's a full house. It's the Manchester Derby on Sunday. Of course it is. So hello Laurie. Hello Andy. Hello, Andy. How we feeling? All right? Feeling good. It's heavy. Yeah, Andy you're quiet. Yeah, I'm looking forward to the Derby. Andy's very quiet. You always gets nervous out of a Derby, don't he? I do. But I am looking forward to it. Edgy. I don't like Derby buildup. I've never enjoyed Manchester Derby Buildup. It's worse than any other game for me. At our school, we used to like basically run around and try and start on the city, you know, fans that were in our school. It was fun. It was great, you know, little scraps. I imagine there was a lot of them in Stockport, Leroy. Start on them. Well, you know, just a little, you know, dead arms and stuff like that. Nothing too major, but, you know, some running scraps on the playground. This is it. This is how I want United to defend set pieces.

Where you grew up, would that be City or United? Are you, Andy? You're trying to get me to expose. Stop Potter, aren't you, Andy? Andy. It was more United than City, trust me. Yeah? Yeah. Ian? United. A few older fans as well. Carl, would there be any city fans in london car seriously i'm

genuinely interested not not when i was growing up there are now absolutely there are now

but when i was growing up no it was it was united versus arsenal head arms and tom full of manchester i'm

from one of the city's official supporters clubs is called blues in bandit country, so even they acknowledge that it's pure United. To be fair, there's some cracking blues there who followed them through Finn and Finn over the years, and then they've had a bit of thick in more recent years. We used to hammer them. We'd be going to Chirin and Madrid and Munich, and they'd be going to Grimsby. When Manchester United played Grimsby a few weeks ago. Don't mention Grimsby. I had more than one message going, you got to Grimsby, yeah. Well, when I was growing up there, Darba was McElwisfield. So, you know, times have changed, right? Yeah, they have changed a little bit. Let's talk about the build-up to this game then.

I mean, it's been the international break.

Manchester United's players are slowly getting themselves back to Manchester,

getting back training.

Incredibly, they're probably only have a couple of days worth of training together

before the game on Sunday, just by the nature of people getting back from South America

and recovery schedules and whatever else. But it's been a quiet international break, Laurie, really, hasn't it, for United? They've had a lot less players away than they would usually have for this game ahead of this game, sorry, and that's probably a good thing. Yeah, as I said, I think on the last podcast, when Ruben Amram was sort of saying, we'll fix this during the international break or we'll have discussions. I could say I thought, I think he meant, you know, within the club structure. But in hindsight, maybe there were some players to work with after all. Although I think he actually gave the players a week off last week. So certainly there was a breathing space to be had for people. then Monday was right let's get back to it so

for example seni Lamond's first training session at Carrington was on Monday even Casimiro

though he came back early from Brazil duty to come back to Carrington and start training again

in preparation for this derby so I think that is a positive you've got the full starts haven't

you Ian but we were sort of comparing it to previous international breaks when certainly it felt

like the whole squad was away and they were all playing.

I sort of had a scroll back through.

For some reason, I just picked out September 2020 international break because that was

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