Chelsea repeating the mistakes that led to last season’s injury crisis
By George Perry
Chelsea swapped Emerson for N’Golo Kante on their injury list on Sunday. The similarities between the two situations are unsettling.
Emerson came off in the 15′ against Liverpool, five minutes later than N’Golo Kante exited the game against Watford on May 5. But unlike Kante, who went down rather abruptly, Emerson showed enough signs of weakness that Marcos Alonso was already warming up for several minutes before Emerson signalled to the Chelsea bench for a change.
Emerson had missed the previous two games to this injury, whereas Kante had played continuously in the weeks leading up to the Watford match. You could argue either way over which player was therefore more vulnerable to reinjury coming into the game: Emerson’s based on it being more serious, or Kante’s because of the lack of recovery time.
Chelsea under Maurizio Sarri last season suffered from poor injury management late in the season in large part due to poor load management throughout the first two-thirds of the season.
Sarri’s refusal to rotate meaningfully through the first half of the season and his skewed distribution of minutes around his preferred “XI + 3 + 4” squad (his favoured starting XI, the usual three subs and the four assorted players who sporadically featured) led to a large portion of the team being overloaded and a few at the other extreme being underloaded and therefore not able to withstand the stresses imposed upon them when they did play, usually in place of a teammate in the first group.
Sarri’s unshakably short-term thinking defined Kante’s May. Sarri played Kante in a meaningless game against Watford despite Kante visibly walking the injury precipice, with that impression supported by news and rumours of a lingering injuruy from international duty. As a result, Chelsea were without Kante for the second leg of the Europa League semifinal and the Premier League finale; and he was a game day decision for the Europa League final, where he played heroically but at the expense of his long-term fitness. He spent the summer and early part of this season paying back the physiological subprime loan he and Sarri took out in Baku to win the lesser European competition.
Frank Lampard and his staff do not appear to have learned much from these incidents.
As we said in May, when a player comes off with a non-contact injury in the first 30 minutes of his return-to-play, he should not have been on the pitch in the first place. That is a failure of everyone who signed off on his approval to play. The amount of stress a player endures in the first 30 minutes – let alone 10-15 minutes – of a game can be simulated in training, and the level of fragility that will fell a player in such a short time is detectable on any one of a battery of medical or performance tests.
Frank Lampard clearly saw something about Marcos Alonso and the 3-4-3 relative to Emerson and the 4-3-3 that made him choose the latter option to face Liverpool. Obviously, a lot of factors go into the formation and lineup than choosing between two players for one position, and N’Golo Kante’s return was probably more consequential than Emerson’s in Lampard’s decision-making. Regardless, Lampard chose Emerson over Alonso, a defensible choice if he was certain of the four-man defence.
But as events laid bare, this choice was not supportable from a sports medicine and physio perspective.
Marcos Alonso outperformed expectations as a left-back, having one of his best games in that position and reinforcing his case to be above Emerson in the depth chart regardless of a full-back or wing-back position. The Blues will not have to go to any great lengths to compensate for Emerson’s absence. However, they are back to being one-deep in a position where they have struggled to have any depth at all over the last four seasons.
Last year at Derby County, Frank Lampard only left Mason Mount and Fikayo Tomori out of the lineup when they were injured.
Mount played through a swollen ankle on Sunday, the result of a dangerous tackle from Francis Coquelin on Tuesday. Mount did well and emerged unscathed, but he was another player who was questionable as of the day before the match yet found himself in the lineup.
What happened to Emerson just as easily could have happened to Mount. A hard but legal challenge, an awkward landing, a weird skid off the edge of the turf towards the sideboards and the narrative of Mount’s courage and dedication in playing through the light injury would have been replaced by mounting questions of Lampard’s squad management, over-reliance on his core players and who will cover attacking midfield.
ICY-somehow-MI. N'Golo Kante's injury is necessary context for Ruben Loftus-Cheek's. light
Chelsea are repeating one of their most obvious mistakes from last year: over-playing key players, which takes the form of minimal rotation when it is an option and rushing players back from injury. Last season it took until the spring until it caught up with them via N’Golo Kante and Ruben Loftus-Cheek. Just seven games into this season, it’s already snatched Emerson Palmieri from the lineup.
Frank Lampard may not have a deep squad of interchangeable £50 million players, but that does not mean he can put everything on a small set of players he fully trusts. He needs to build this squad out now, making elective rotations and conservative return-to-play decisions while he has the chance, before fortune and physiology takes those choices away of him.
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Wednesday’s game against Grimsby Town will be a chance to see how he is adapting and seeking to avoid repeating his own and his predecessor’s mistakes. As excited as everyone is to see Callum Hudson-Odoi and Reece James with the first team, Chelsea need them to go 90 minutes throughout April and May, which may mean going 45 minutes here and there in September and October.