Chelsea looked to be through the worst of their injury nightmare recently – then in the space of 24 hours, Romeo Lavia’s season is officially ended, then Robert Sanchez, Carney Chukwuemeka and Trevoh Chalobah were added to our list of unavailable players.
It’s prompted yet another wave of panic and recrimination about what is going wrong and why. Some people insist it’s just bad luck, but that argument gets harder and harder to sustain every time this happens. Plus there’s the inevitable human desire to find patterns in things.
The club are clearly concerned too. They’ve overhauled the whole medical department, to no avail. Bobby Vincent writes today for Football.London. that the club “have not been able to put their finger on the root cause of the problem.”
Lots of teams are suffering a lot of injuries this season, perhaps as a result of the increasingly packed fixture schedule at the top level.
But Chelsea’s issue seems to be setbacks and relapses as much as the initial problems themselves, and that has to be a problem from within.