Chelsea: Injuries among top-six warrants another look at squad rotation

Chelsea have only one first-team regular – Antonio Rudiger – on the injury table as the squad returns from international break. Maurizio Sarri and his staff need only look around the top six to understand why they cannot get complacent about rest and rotation.

Like most of the other teams in the top six plus eighth-place Manchester United, many Chelsea players had very short, minimally restful off-seasons because of the World Cup. Those same players have had little let up since the Premier League season began between three competitions plus their ongoing national team responsibilities. Gareth Southgate weighed in on the toll the English schedule takes on internationals, and it is only a matter of time before club coaches do as well.

Antonio Rudiger and Ethan Ampadu are the only Chelsea players unavailable through injury. This has the Blues in an enviable and fortunate position. The rest of the top teams are missing many more and more important players. Mohamed Salah, Virgil van Dijk, James Milner, Kevin de Bruyne, Danilo, Sokratis, Jesse Lingard, Nemanja Matic and Christian Eriksen are among the players who are questionable at best for this weekend’s return.

Chelsea must not misattribute their good fortune. To some extent, it is just that. Over the last few weeks Pedro, Willian, Andreas Christensen and Mateo Kovacic have all left the pitch for club or country nursing some kind of pre-injury. In the game against Southampton, David Luiz signalled for a replacement late in the first half. Gary Cahill started warming up, but Luiz overcame whatever it was and finished the game.

Among the top six, only Liverpool have used fewer players and have fewer players with over 100 minutes than Chelsea in the Premier League. Eighteen Blues have taken the pitch in a league fixture, and 14 have over 100 minutes. Liverpool have 17 and 12 players, respectively.

By contrast, Tottenham and Manchester United (we know, not in the top six) have 19 players with over 100 minutes. Manchester City have used 20 players, 17 of whom have accumulated triple-digit minutes.

Each of those teams are dealing with more injuries than Chelsea. On the one hand, you could say that shows there is no real correlation between squad usage / rotation and injury. More realistically, you conclude Chelsea are an outlier, and an accidental one at that. They are due for a regression to the mean.

The number of near-misses – those players who walked off gingerly but still made it back for the next game – speaks to the tightrope the Blues are on. The breaks are going their way and perhaps they are doing a better job with their return-to-play protocols. But if a few breaks go the other way as they enter the time of year when the physio staffs knowingly fight a losing battle against fixture congestion, the Blues could lose a wave of players. In that case, the lack of rotation will not only exact a toll on the team through the missing players, but do so doubly given the lack of match-sharp and experienced back-ups.

Rotation is about more than the players who appear in any two consecutive games. When we tweeted about Maurizio Sarri’s lack of rotation to face MOL Vidi at home in the Europa League, a transnational coalition of Mr. Helpful’s pointed out how Sarri made eight changes from the Liverpool fixture five days earlier.

This is not rotation, at least not in any useful sense. Rotation is about the overall pool of players from which Sarri draws over longer stretches of time: a month, a half season etc. Sarri has 18-20 players from whom he assembles two 11-man squads each week. Since he almost always makes three substitutions, even if he makes eight changes between two games most of those 18-20 players will play twice a week. But Sarri usually makes fewer changes for the Carabao Cup and Europa League, overloading some players while overlooking others. This creates situations where Willian makes four starts in nine days, Jorginho goes four in twelve, and Mateo Kovacic makes seven in 28.

Sarri’s “rotation” of switching eight players or so between the weekend and midweek game, plus substitutions and international appearances, means his most-used 15 players rarely if ever get a full week without a match. They may not play the full 90 in three consecutive matches, but over any relevant timeframe they are playing two-thirds or more of the available minutes.

This is the danger of under-rotating and superficial rotation. Chelsea have 17 games on the schedule for the remainder of 2018, including trips to Belarus and Hungary, plus the November international break. The Premier League injury table looks like the Blues may owe the piper.

Before long, the festive season will be open them. Choices about squad selection have a way of vanishing from coaches’ control around that time of year.