Chelsea: N’Golo Kante’s injury teaches a harsh lesson in crisis management

N’Golo Kante is still in doubt for the Europa League final, and if he plays he will be starting at less than full fitness and capacity. Chelsea are always weaker without him, but they did not need to be this weak.

Anyone who has worked in emergency planning – public relations / communications, security or any other job where you would rather not be caught with your pants down – knows the principles of prevention, mitigation and response. Your priority is making sure something adverse can not and does not happen. However, knowing that the best prevention plans sometimes fall short, you plan ways to minimize the consequences of whatever could happen. And then once something does happen, you have a plan to return to a normal state as efficiently as possible.

Maurizio Sarri did not follow these principles, and now Chelsea FC may go into the Europa League final without one of their two most important players. Sarri’s squad management throughout the season did nothing to prevent, mitigate or lay out a response for an injury to N’Golo Kante.

As we’ve discussed at length here before, N’Golo Kante’s recent injuries were foreseeable and explainable, even if they were not predictable.

With just over 4,000 extremely active minutes – fourth-most among Chelsea’s outfield players – following directly from a full World Cup, Kante has been near his limit for weeks. Load management is a major part of injury prevention. Even without all the monitoring and testing Chelsea have access to and should have been consulting, Kante’s volume this season should have been a factor in the team’s rotation.

Rotation is just as important for mitigation as it is prevention. By using more players, not only does a coach reduce the volume – and therefore the injury risk – to his most-used players, he also ensures he has back-ups who are match-sharp and tactically comfortable.

Maurizio Sarri and his parrots will tell you that Danny Drinkwater cannot play in a three-man midfield or that Ethan Ampadu – like Callum Hudson-Odoi (injured) and Ruben Loftus-Cheek (injured) – was not ready to play early in the season. But Drinkwater playing in the dead rubbers of the Europa League group stages and the domestic cups could have made him an option to relieve Kante later in the season.

Drinkwater or Ampadu (had he not been injured – under-use can be just as risky) could have both given N’Golo Kante some days or simply minutes off later in the season. This could have allowed Kante the necessary time to recover and be fully ready for the Europa League final. Or, if the worst-case scenario to Kante played out, either of these two could be smoothly prepared and deployed in Baku. They would not be as good as Kante, but they would minimize the disruption to the rest of the squad and be better than the one alternative.

If Kante is unable to play all or part of the game, Chelsea have no ready response. Simply by process of elimination, the midfield would be Jorginho, Ross Barkley and Mateo Kovacic, since Loftus-Cheek is injured. No other midfielders have played in 2018/19, bar Ampadu’s 283 minutes in the first months of the season.

Barkley and Kovacic are far from an effective pairing, at least in a 4-3-3. And since Barkley-for-Kovacic is Sarri’s usual like-for-like swap, starting them together will ripple through his usual in-game midfield management.

The Blues do not have any tactical adjustments that can compensate for the personnel losses. Sarri has used the 4-3-3 exclusively this season, only making slight adjustments in the spacing of the lines in two games against Manchester City (but not the one Chelsea lost 6-0). Chelsea have no way of making up for Kante’s pressing, tackling, dispossessing, covering Jorginho or protecting the back-line by either changing the players or changing the formation.

They will simply go on as if he was there, even as Arsenal, Chelsea and everybody else are acutely aware of his absence.

Chelsea’s late-season rash of injuries indicts the coaching staff’s man-management and sports science.

N’Golo Kante’s current injury is reported to be “a knock,” which implies a contact injury. Again, this is not isolated from his loading. He is vulnerable to “knocks” because of those 4,000 minutes and his other recent injury. This is prevention and mitigation at the individual level. Chelsea failed to prevent the first injury, which raised the risk of the second. They did not mitigate the consequences of that first injury, consequences which include an increased risk of a secondary injury, which is what he has now.

Any team is better when N’Golo Kante is in the squad: Caen, Leicester, Chelsea and France. None of those teams are better without him. He is irreplaceable.

But unless a team wants their success to be completely dependent on one player, they must plan for the day when that player cannot be there. They have to do what they can prevent that from happening.

But injuries happen, many of them freakish and truly accidental. That’s part of the game, and the teams must have people and processes in place to mitigate the immediate effects of those injuries. Even if the prevention fails, mitigation can still come to the team’s rescue. Players should come off the bench and slot into the system in the middle of the game, if necessary. Football does not stop because one player does.

And once they have set things into as stable a condition as possible, they have to respond and continue chasing their goals at close to their intact level.

Prevention. Mitigation. Response. Chelsea are 0/3 as far as N’Golo Kante is concerned. Danny Drinkwater could not be reached for comment.