Trent Alexander-Arnold is expected to be out for at least two months after a scan confirmed the Real Madrid full-back has torn his left thigh muscle.<\/p>\n
Alexander-Arnold was withdrawn just before the hour in a 3-0 win<\/a> at Athletic Bilbao on Wednesday night having provided his first assist of the season, from which Kylian Mbapp\u00e9 scored the opening goal. He was making his fourth consecutive start since suffering an injury \u2013 also to his left thigh \u2013 against Marseille in September.<\/p>\n Although Madrid did not specify the extent of the injury or the estimated time out, Alexander-Arnold is not expected to return until February. That would mean him miss the rest of the league phase of the Champions League, starting with Wednesday\u2019s meeting with Manchester City.<\/p>\n The defender will also be a doubt for the Spanish Super Cup in Saudi Arabia, the next three rounds of the Copa del Rey should Madrid progress and up to nine league games. Any hopes of winning a place in Thomas Tuchel\u2019s England<\/a> squad for next summer\u2019s World Cup are fast fading, too.<\/p>\n Alexander-Arnold played every match at the Club World Cup after joining Madrid<\/a> in July. Since then, he has made just 11 appearances across Madrid\u2019s 20 games. With Dani Carvajal still to come back from a knee injury, Madrid are left without a recognised right-back.<\/p>\n Game over for Real Madrid\u2019s Trent Alexander-Arnold after sustaining an injury against Athletic Bilbao. Photograph: Pankra Nieto\/Reuters<\/p>\n Alexander-Arnold returned from his injury against Marseille for nine minutes against his former club Liverpool<\/a> at Anfield on 4 November and seven minutes against Rayo Vallecano five days later. He started each of Madrid\u2019s next three matches \u2013 victory against Olympiakos and domestic draws with Elche and Girona \u2013 and again at Athletic on Wednesday night.<\/p>\n skip past newsletter promotion<\/a><\/p>\n Sign up to Football Daily<\/p>\n Kick off your evenings with the Guardian’s take on the world of football<\/p>\n Privacy Notice: Newsletters may contain information about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. If you do not have an account, we will create a guest account for you on theguardian.com<\/a> to send you this newsletter. You can complete full registration at any time. For more information about how we use your data see our Privacy Policy<\/a>. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy<\/a> and Terms of Service<\/a> apply.<\/p>\n after newsletter promotion<\/p>\n There had been doubts about his performances, with Xabi Alonso inclined to use Fede Valverde at right-back, but Bilbao was his most impressive display for Madrid. He completed 32 of 38 passes, including the 50-yard ball that saw Mbapp\u00e9 race away for the first goal.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Trent Alexander-Arnold is expected to be out for at least two months after a scan confirmed the Real…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":325603,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[440],"tags":[49,48,561,82],"class_list":{"0":"post-325602","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-soccer","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-canada","10":"tag-soccer","11":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/325602","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=325602"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/325602\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/325603"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=325602"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=325602"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=325602"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}