Manchester United want-away Dean Henderson may yet find himself starting for the Red Devils next season, with their goalkeeping situation still a mess.
Manager Erik ten Hag doesn't know who his No.1 shot-stopper will be for the 2023-24 campaign, which for United begins at home to Wolves on Monday, August 14. Long before that, though, his side face Leeds in a pre-season friendly over in Norway.
With only two weeks until that fixture, Ten Hag faces a race against time to decide on who'll play between the posts. While Henderson, 26, expects to join former club Nottingham Forest on a permanent basis during the summer transfer window after a positive loan spell last term, the Sun claim that Ten Hag is open to keeping the Red Devils academy graduate at Old Trafford amid the uncertainty surrounding current first-choice goalkeeper David de Gea.
After United angered De Gea by withdrawing a contract offer - which he'd already signed and was willing to take a significant pay cut on - the Spaniard is now due to become a free agent on Saturday when his current £375,000-a-week deal expires. That'd leave Henderson and third-choice 'keeper Tom Heaton as Ten Hag's only senior options heading into the Leeds friendly in Oslo.
While Ten Hag values Heaton's presence around the camp, the Red Devils boss has been reluctant to play him. So much so, Ten Hag insisted on loaning in Martin Dubravka and Jack Butland to play the role of De Gea's immediate backup during the first and season halves of last season respectively.
Henderson, meanwhile, headed to the City Ground for another impressive loan spell. The 26-year-old suffered a serious thigh injury in January, forcing him to miss the rest of the campaign and undergo surgery which is expected to rule him out for a portion of pre-season.
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Whether Henderson will be fit enough to start against Leeds remains unknown, but the suggestion that Ten Hag is open to selecting him will come as a surprise to most fans. The once-capped England international didn't even want to train under the Dutchman last summer because he was so desperate to secure a move away having spent much of the previous campaign on the bench.
Speaking to talkSPORT, the ever-confident Henderson claimed: "I didn't really want the manager to see me in training because I knew he'd probably want to keep me. I told all the hierarchy: 'I need to go and play football. I don't want to be playing second fiddle'. And it panned out so I was almost gone before the manager came in."
Reflecting on his frustrations during 2021-22, the Carlisle United youth product went on to reveal: "I turned so many good loans down last summer, and they wouldn't let me go. It was frustrating. To sit there and waste 12 months is criminal really, at my age. I was fuming."
Despite Ten Hag's open stance, a report from the Manchester United News argues that Henderson is puzzled by talk of him remaining at Old Trafford, as he's fully convinced that he'll be joining Forest permanently at some point this summer. United will only sell for the right price, though, with anywhere from £15million to £25m being mooted.
