England will make a late decision on whether Declan Rice is fit to start the World Cup semi-final against Argentina.<\/p>\n
But there remains optimism the Arsenal midfielder can shake off the effects of an illness to play on Wednesday.<\/p>\n
Rice, who suffered with a sickness bug in the lead-up to Saturday’s quarter-final victory over Norway in Miami, was substituted at half-time.<\/p>\n
Head coach Thomas Tuchel admitted afterwards that Rice had spent three days in bed before the match, which England won 2-1 after extra time.<\/p>\n
It is understood Rice still has not recovered fully from the illness – picked up in Mexico, where England beat the co-hosts 3-2 in the last 16 – but his condition has improved markedly over the past 48 hours.<\/p>\n
As things stand, there is growing hope he will be well enough to start in Atlanta.<\/p>\n
Rice is almost certain to rule himself fit for the semi-final given the enormity of the occasion.<\/p>\n
But given the severity of the illness, England medics are set to make a late call on his availability.<\/p>\n
And Tuchel will wait to see how rapidly his condition improves before making a final decision on whether to pick him.<\/p>\n
In addition to his recovery from the sickness bug, Rice has also been carrying a neural problem for several months, affecting his lower back and hamstring.<\/p>\n
The midfielder, who has 78 caps, has started all but one of England’s World Cup games so far, missing the 2-0 group-stage win over Panama because of an injury flare-up.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"England will make a late decision on whether Declan Rice is fit to start the World Cup semi-final…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":800072,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[440],"tags":[49,48,561,82],"class_list":["post-800071","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-soccer","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-soccer","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/800071","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=800071"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/800071\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/800072"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=800071"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=800071"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=800071"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}