Chelsea: N’Golo Kante’s injury is necessary context for Ruben Loftus-Cheek’s

Ruben Loftus-Cheek suffered much the same injury as Callum Hudson-Odoi, but N’Golo Kante provides a more important comparison. Chelsea should not have been in Boston, and Loftus-Cheek should not have been on the pitch.

A few hours before Kepa Arrizabalaga memed his way into Chelsea lore at the Carabao Cup finals, Manchester United provided the first demonstration of the day about the importance of assessing player readiness and return-to-play. Jesse Lingard had missed United’s FA Cup game against Chelsea the previous week. He was questionable for United’s fixture against Liverpool, but Ole Gunnar Solksjaer named him to the bench. When Juan Mata went down with injury in the 25′, Lingard replaced him. Eighteen minutes later, Lingard came back off, re-injured. Lingard missed the next three Premier League games, a Champions League game against Paris Saint-Germain and national duty in the March break.

N’Golo Kante had a similar, even shorter, experience on May 5. Even though N’Golo Kante looked fatigue in preceding games against Manchester United and Eintracht Frankfurt, Maurizio Sarri started Kante against Watford. Kante lasted only 10 minutes and is still questionable for the Europa League final.

Even though Ruben Loftus-Cheek ruptured an Achilles tendon like Callum Hudson-Odoi, the circumstances were much closer to Kante’s and Lingard’s. Loftus-Cheek was on the pitch less than 20 minutes before he hobbled off.

Loftus-Cheek’s injury, like Kante’s and Lingard’s, manifested itself in the normal run of play. They were non-contact injuries: Ashley Barnes and Sergio Ramos were nowhere to be seen. None of them manifested themselves during the sort of discrete non-contact scenarios that often lead to such injures. Examples of those are a sharp change of direction resulting in an ACL tear, or a hamstring strain during a powerful straight-line acceleration (an athlete “pulling up” during a sprint).

These three players were not able to withstand the baseline levels of stress that go into a game of football. This is scarcely fathomable given the amount of data collected on these athletes in training and games.

The amount of data teams can, should and do collect on their players is difficult to describe, but it can rightly fall under the umbrella of “big data.”

Premier League clubs have staffs of sports scientists, conditioning coaches and data analysts examining every intersection and trend of load, volume and intensity. And that is just the external data. The teams can also measure and assess things like muscle activation, neuromuscular readiness, metabolic states and pretty much anything else the human body does. They then package that into some kind of brief for the head coach to consider along with his tactical needs for the upcoming games.

Even if a club has a truly tech-phobic coach, he should still at least be designing his training sessions to mimic the demands of a game.

Injured players should be undergoing rehab assessments that test them for their ability to withstand the stresses of games and produce the necessary outputs. This means not going for a light jog, but doing repeated sprints. Not a single vertical jump, but repeated jumps, perhaps with a directional sprint upon landing. Not just having them lift some weights, but measuring their rate of force development and total power production. All things that will unfailingly arise in or directly correlate to a game.

When a player cannot make it 20 minutes in a game, you have to ask what were the assessment protocols that cleared them for play? What were their various force and power outputs in training over the last week? What trends did they show in acceleration, deceleration, change of direction, neuromuscular activation, muscle activation, and anything else that is readily available to the coaching staff? What were the thresholds the coaches used to clear them to play, with what caveats and warnings, and against which considerations did the head coaches decide it was worth the risks?

These kinds of injuries do not “just happen.” They are not bad luck. They arise from discrete, detectable and knowable vulnerabilities that raise the risks of injury. The deficiencies and change in risk are quantifiable. These injuries are foreseeable with some level of statistical confidence and professional intuition.

In each case – Lingard, Kante and Loftus-Cheek – the decision to play these players wasn’t just wrong. It was spectacularly wrong. Much like when Jan Vertonghen nearly vomited and passed out on the touchline after (ahem) passing the concussion protocol, the end result forces you to say either the processes or the people are dangerously unfit for purpose.

Ruben Loftus-Cheek’s history of back injuries does not shift the conversation just because he suffered an Achilles injury against New England.

Human movement is amazingly integrated. Any injury increases an athlete’s global risk for injuries because of the compensations, psychological inhibitions (kinesiophobia) and asymmetries the initial injury can leave behind. Re-injuring the affected area is the most common and highest probability, but all injuries make the next one more likely, regardless of location.

Without a doubt, the turf was as dangerous – maybe more so – as some of the pitches teams encounter in the nether reaches of the Europa League. Why that doesn’t spike Major League Soccer injury rates is for another time.

But the turf, like everything else surrounding the game – travel, rest and recovery – was part of the environment all Chelsea players faced on Wednesday.

Yet the only player to be injured was the player who came into the match the furthest from full fitness, and who played fewer minutes before coming off than any other player. The sort of kinesthetic control that allows people to protect themselves when slipping on an awkward surface such as MLS’s artificial turf is exactly the sort of thing that can be compromised on many fronts by a long-standing or lingering deficiency somewhere in the body.

The surface was an environmental factor that raised the risk for everyone, but only pushed over the injury threshold the player who came into the game closest to his.

Even if Chelsea were not in the Europa League final, this friendly was an unnecessary risk for players coming off the stresses of a long season in four competitions. The goal was noble but the logistics should have sent Roman Abramovich back to the drawing board, especially as Chelsea looked more and more likely to finish their season in Baku.

Abramovich had a lot personally invested in the “Final Whistle Against Hate” match. He would not have been pleased had Sarri fielded a starting XI of academy players, or not given Chelsea’s stars a chance to play in front of the American audience. Abramovich would have taken that as a slight against the event, and perhaps even against himself personally and his efforts to combat anti-Semitism. Some amount of pressure almost certainly made its way from Abramovich to Maurizio Sarri.

However, that does not absolve Sarri and the staff, nor does his anger when Loftus-Cheek went down. Everything available to the staff would have provided some indication of Loftus-Cheek’s vulnerability, and that should have been enough to leave him behind in England or on the bench. Sarri’s anger was the natural product of losing one of his best players in a gratuitous match, perhaps with some recognition that he – Sarri – could have and should have done better.

Again, the proof is in the outcome. This is not a “post hoc prompter ergo hoc” fallacy. Had Loftus-Cheek – like Kante and Lingard before him – made it 60 minutes or 45 minutes, then we could say the injury was unfortunate and unavoidable. But 10, 18 or 20 minutes? No.

Injuries are part of the game, coaches are human and sports science can only do so much. But that doesn’t mean injuries are the product of chance or luck, at least not all of them.