GREG Leigh will be given two weeks off when he returns from Copa America duty with Jamaica.
The 29-year-old left back’s season began at Ipswich Town back at the beginning of August and ran all the way through to Oxford United’s Sky Bet League One play-off final victory in May.
However, he was then on international duty with Jamaica for World Cup qualifiers and then the Copa America this summer.
It means Leigh will be afforded some extra time off, as the rest of the United squad returns for pre-season training this morning.
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U’s head coach Des Buckingham said: “Greg will get an extra two weeks. From Wembley, he literally flew out a couple of days after, and has just continued playing.
“He’ll need a bit of a break, so he’ll be away for the first two weeks, but otherwise everybody will be back in on Monday.
“We’ll do a week here and then fly off to Spain, and do a week in Spain before we start ramping up some fixtures to get us ready for a very exciting season.”
Expanding further upon what the next couple of weeks will look like for United’s players, Buckingham said: “We’ll do a five-day reintroduction for them, so they’ll do all the testing on the first day.
“It’s not going to be a restart, it’s going to be a continuation of building on what we did in the last two and a half months.
“Then we’re away to Spain, where we’ll take in a game at the end of that against a Portuguese side, before coming back here and ramping the games up, with Oxford City, Solihull Moors, Mansfield [Town], Palermo and others yet to be announced.”
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Buckingham meanwhile is hoping to bring in some new faces now that pre-season is officially underway, and is seeking to get players in earlier rather than later.
He said: “We’re looking across the team and where we feel both quality and experience are going to be important to us.
“I won’t put a number on that, or positions, because I did that in January and I was pinned for that.
“We did a lot of work before Wembley, and now post-Wembley, to make sure we’ve highlighted the players that fit the style of football we want, and fit the profile of that position.
“The ownership group, the board, the CEO and the chairman are all well aware of that looks like. Hopefully we can have a few more through the door earlier in pre-season than later.”
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