Injury boost for Sheffield United as "big player" takes huge fitness step following summer Everton transfer

Tom Davies is back "on the grass" with Sheffield United after taking a big step forward in his bid for fitness. The former Everton man has played less than an hour of regular-time football for the Blades since his summer free-transfer move, following his departure from his boyhood club.

Davies arrived at Bramall Lane after pre-season without a club following his decision to turn down a contract offer from Everton, with the Blades low on Premier League experience and hoping to reap the benefits of the midfielder's extensive familiarity with the top-flight. But he could not hit the ground running immediately as United managed him to get him up to speed and after three substitute appearances against Tottenham, Newcastle and West Ham - totaling less than an hour, excluding injury time - he suffered a freak quad injury in training which has kept him out since September.

Signed in the summer by Paul Heckingbottom, Davies has been namechecked on several occasions by his predecessor Chris Wilder in interviews and the Blades boss views Davies as a big player in his side's bid to avoid the drop back to the Championship this season. Speaking ahead of this weekend's trip to Manchester City, for which Anel Ahmedhodzic and Gus Hamer are banned and James McAtee ineligible, Wilder said: "We've got a couple of suspensions and a couple players with knocks, bumps and bruises that we'll look at.

"We've got to utilise the squad as well. I bumped into John Egan today who's a big player and was talking to Tom Davies, who's back on the grass, which is great news. These are experienced players. Egs is captain of country and Tom has played all his football in the Prem. There's some big players missing but we'll go with what we've got and we'll be as competitive as we can possibly be.

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"There's still a lot of work to be done but the great thing is that Tom is back moving about and doing conditioning work and ball work, I'm delighted to see Tom doing that. It's been a difficult few months for him. He came here to play football and he'll be a really good player for the club. He's a good signing and him missing is a blow. They're all at different stages, Rhian [Brewster] is back with us and Rhys Norrington-Davies is back with us. Tom's at that unavailable stage but getting there. We're working away and they're working extremely hard brcause we need as many of them back as possible."

On Norrington-Davies and Brewster, who recently returned to the first-team squad after their respective injury absences, Wilder added: "I don't think they're in a position to start games at the moment but there's potential to play in under-21 games and behind-closed-doors bounce games, which we're going to try and fix up in the new year. So they'll get their minutes in those, and then hopefully they can progress from there."