Albion could keep Mats Wieffer on hold as he prepares to make his first Albion appearance.

The Holland midfielder is close to a return to action after the thigh injury which cut short his 2023-24 season with Feyenoord.

But he did not join colleagues during the open train session before about 5,000 fans in Tokyo today.

Wieffer did some separate exercises one-to-one with a member of the fitness staff while colleagues went through warm-up drills in a group.

He then watched the rest of training from the sidelines.

It could now be that Albion target next Saturday’s game at QPR to get him involved.

They face Tokyo Verdy here tomorrow, at 6.30pm local and 10.30am BST.

 

Before leaving the training ground, head coach Fabian Huerzeler told The Argus: “We have to look tonight.

“Speak with the medical department, then see what is the most sensible for this player because we don’t want to take any risks.

“We want to build him up slowly so he can add to the intensity on the pitch.

“We lost unfortunately some other players, so we really have to take care with regulation, with how many minutes we give him or if we let him play or not.

“We have to do that with every player but, of course, Matsy comes back from a long injury so we cannot take unnecessary risks.”

Billy Gilmour, Jack Hinshelwood, Adam Webster and Carl Rushworth are all among players who are being carefully managed.

Igor is currently out injured although he was with the squad at the training ground.

Huerzeler said: “He has some problem so he can’t train at the moment.

“We have to look week by week so there is nothing we can say, like ‘it takes two weeks, three weeks’.

“We look week to week.”