Leicester City suffer injury blow ahead of Bournemouth with Steve Cooper coy on absent players

Hamza Choudhury has dislocated his shoulder with Leicester City fearing he may be sidelined for a significant period.

The academy product suffered the injury in an innocuous incident in training on Wednesday, manager Steve Cooper has said. The club are now waiting for it to settle down so they can see how severe the damage is, but there are fears he could face a months-long absence.

Choudhury is the only definite fresh injury at City, the midfielder joining Jakub Stolarczyk and Patson Daka on the sidelines. But there could be more players absent from the weekend’s clash with Bournemouth, Cooper revealing that a couple of players haven’t trained this week. However, he was not willing to share who those players were.

“Unfortunately, Hamza dislocated his shoulder in training yesterday in an innocuous situation,” Cooper said at his press conference on Thursday afternoon. “We’re still working out the extent of how long he will be out because it’s still settling down, but it’s certainly going to be a little while. Whether that’s weeks or months, we’re not sure yet because it can be quite complicated.

“It was a really unfortunate situation. It was a normal duel, a normal challenge, no foul, and unfortunately his shoulder ended up on the wrong side of an awkward position.

“Jannik (Vestergaard) has started training fully today, so he’s back with the group. There’s been a couple of kicks for some players that we’ve had to manage through the week and that have not trained yet, but hopefully they’re getting over that and we’ll see if they’re available for the weekend.”

Asked if he had a list of the players who had not trained this week, Cooper said: “I do, yeah.” Asked if he was willing to reveal who they were, he replied: “No, not at the moment. A couple of lads are touch-and-go to be fair, so we’ll wait and see.”

Choudhury’s injury opens the door to one of Vestergaard, Boubakary Soumare, Kasey McAteer, Luke Thomas, or Will Alves to get onto the bench at the King Power Stadium this weekend. All five were missing from the squad for the 4-2 defeat to Arsenal last weekend.