The latest West Brom injury and fitness news ahead of Blackburn Rovers

Josh Maja won’t be in the squad this weekend as West Brom kick off their Championship season at Blackburn Rovers on Saturday. The latest Albion signing, who only arrived at the club earlier this week, left Bordeaux at the end of his contract in May, and while he’s been keeping fit, the striker is without a regular pre-season.

Maja is being targeted for inclusion when Albion welcome Swansea City to The Hawthorns on Saturday week for their first home game of the new campaign, and in the meantime the club will continue to get more work into his legs in preparation for that date. It does mean, though, that Brandon Thomas-Asante will be the solo, senior, centre forward at Ewood Park.

“The idea with him after we signed him and started work is he is going to need five or six individual days to work with some day of recovery between the work, so let’s put seven days,” Carlos Corberan explained of Maja’s availability, “and after then two days with the group, so now more or less it’s to make him available to be playing for the second league game.”

Asked directly if there was even a slim chance that Maja could travel to Blackburn and be a part of the 20-man squad, Corberan replied: “No, impossible.”

Fellow new arrival Jeremy Sarmiento, meanwhile, will head north for the Baggies’ curtain raiser – but he isn’t yet deemed to be what Corberan would consider ‘ready’. Winger Sarmiento, who has joined from Brighton on loan, had surgery on his foot injury in March but is ahead of Maja in pre-season terms.

“Sarmiento is a different situation,” Corberan explained. “The only difficulty with him is that he had surgery last March and the process of the surgery was finished two weeks after we started pre-season. It allowed him to be working with Brighton for ten days before they travelled to the US.

“He did 8-10 days working with them, so he arrived here with six or seven training sessions with the group. It means that he is not ready, but he’s available. There’s a difference.”

Albion will also be without long-term absentees Daryl Dike, Grady Diangana and Martin Kelly, while Adam Reach is the other player who is set to miss out – he has undergone successful surgery on his quad this week and is expected to return in the New Year after a period of rehabilitation. Elsewhere, Albion are looking healthy – and Jayson Molumby is set to return this weekend, having missed the pre-season friendly finale at Bolton last Saturday.

“The squad is good,” Corberan added. “It has been, for me, a positive pre-season because we’ve otherwise avoided injuries to the team – except, of course, for the negative point of Reach. That is a pity, especially for him because when you have been out of the squad for three months and working hard, when you come back and then…50% of the cases having not had surgery go again with an injury.

“We did our best to avoid this, but unfortunately he went into that group and he know has to go into a process which is a little more complicated. It’s the only negative point, because I don’t want to lose any of my players, especially because I know how difficult a process it is for him, but I know he has the personality to face this in the best way.

“Molumby is going to be one of the available players. You will see who I decide to play, but he is going to be involved in the game at Saturday.”