Chelsea: Injuries mean preseason lineups may carry over to the season

Chelsea open their preseason schedule with four players who would otherwise be in the best starting XI out of the lineup through injury. Frank Lampard’s squad against Bohemians may look unusually like the one he has to field against Manchester United.

Chelsea’s man-games lost to injury spiked dramatically in the last few weeks of the 2018/19 season. N’Golo Kante was 50/50 the morning of the Europa League final. Playing him in Baku was a rather heavy risk, one that paid off in terms of the victory and him being able to go the full 90 minutes. But Kante and the Blues are still working off that debt, as word emerged today that Kante is training by himself as he continues his rehabilitation.

Along with Kante, Antonio Rudiger, Callum Hudson-Odoi and Ruben Loftus-Cheek were all the regular rotation, if not the starting XI, for the closing stages of last season but will miss the opening weeks of next season. Reece James had a strong chance of featuring early next season, but now he, too, will have his Chelsea debut delayed through injury.

This puts a bit more emphasis on the preseason games. All the players in the squad were already going in with the mindset that Frank Lampard means it when he says everyone has a fresh opportunity to earn their way into the squad.

The injuries will keep Lampard’s mind fully open, as he will need players otherwise on the fringe to play their way into the opening day XI.

Whereas preseason is usually about returning starters and marquee transfers cementing their roles in the starting XI while fringe players battle just to stay with the squad or at least secure a good loan, some of those in the latter category will be fighting for a place in those early XI’s. Some of the combinations Lampard tests out in preseason will not just be experiments to see if a few players work well with each other, but to see if they could be a functional if suboptimal subset of a Premier League lineup.

The injury situation will also test Lampard’s man-management skills when the regulars are ready to resume play.

If the early-season fill-in option is performing well when his counterpart returns, Lampard will either need to keep one of his presumptive regulars on the bench to let that recently-fringe player continue in the role he is holding down; or he will need to explain that, despite quality performances, this other player was never going to be a permanent solution.

This is always a delicate balance for the manager, who wants to reward top performances with more minutes but also knows who his best players are, even if they haven’t yet played in a given season. For the fringe player, he may have turned down a loan because he thought the spot at Chelsea would be his as long as those early performances were good enough.

As we’ve learned over the last few seasons, a defining trait of a manager is how he handles players who are not regulars in the squad: does he keep them connected and motivated, and use them in rewarding ways on and off the pitch? Or does he, well, you know.

There is usually only so much to glean from a club’s preseason games. Tactics are experimental, lineups are highly shuffled and while everyone wants to impress, no one is going all out at the risk of hurting themselves or others. This preseason, though, what happens on the tour may directly reflect what happens in the first few weeks of the season.

Injuries have as much to say about Chelsea’s first starting XI as Frank Lampard. The players and combinations we see in the next few weeks – which would otherwise be interesting and amusing, at most – could be on the pitch at Old Trafford.