Chelsea: Ajax was not the time to rotate, but sometime soon will have to be

Chelsea have five games in the 14 days leading into the next international break, when most of the starters will feature for their national teams. Playing away to Ajax was not the occasion for squad rotation, but something soon will have to be.

Frank Lampard has six players who have played in over 75% of Chelsea’s match minutes this season. Even someone who has watched a smaller fraction of Chelsea this season could probably guess who those six players are.

Chelsea opened the game against Ajax with the same XI that started the second half at Newcastle. The Champions League tie against Ajax was not the occasion for Lampard to rotate his squad. The Blues were away from home against one of last season’s Champions League semifinalists. Even with the loss of Matthias de Ligt and Frankie de Jong Ajax are one of the most dynamic and intense teams in Europe. And the game was nearly a must-win, and was certainly a must-not-lose. A loss would have left Chelsea no better than third in Group H, and the outcome of Lille vs. Valencia could have created a deep hole for Chelsea to dig out of.

But Lampard cannot continue piling the minutes on his core six players. At some point, Mason Mount, Tammy Abraham, Fikayo Tomori, Kurt Zouma, Cesar Azpilicueta and Jorginho (are those the six you guessed? Kepa Arrizabalaga is actually one of the six, but we pulled Tomori up because he is just off the cusp of 75%) will need a match day off to get six or seven days between appearances.

The first three players have the enthusiasm and resilience of youth, but the underside of their age is that their bodies are still developing, which means they have unique risks for injury and recovery. The Blues are already managing the short- and long-term return-to-play process for Callum Hudson-Odoi and Reece James, and Ruben Loftus-Cheek is still in any of the number of post-injury return-to-play processes started when he was a youth.

Azpilicueta is on the other end. He already has a decade of heavy loading on his body, and is reaching the point where both the regular post-game recovery processes take longer than before, and a long-term recovery could drag on.

Kurt Zouma and Jorginho are the only players in their physiological prime years, who may be able to withstand the twice-weekly expectations. Zouma has already had one career-threatening injury in Blue, but does not show any signs of re-injury or other compromise. Jorginho, at least, can count on some relief once N’Golo Kante and Loftus-Cheek return to the XI, even if that comes in the form of tactical substitutions rather than load management. For a tired body, a day off is a day off.

On the other hand, we should be careful not to project our concerns from last season onto this season. Chelsea made it through the first half of the season with little rotation and without too many injuries. As the second half of the season progressed, more Blues started missing games until the calamitous April and May cost them Hudson-Odoi, Loftus-Cheek and N’Golo Kante. We regularly talked of the combination of overloading players’ game time with underloading their injury prevention fitness training, going all the way back to preseason.

Along with Jody Morris, Frank Lampard brought long-time Derby County strength and conditioning coach Andy Burrows with him to Chelsea.

Derby had had one of the best injury prevention and management records in the Championship, and much of this is due to the conditioning and physio staffs. Lampard’s training regimen and Burrow’s conditioning work – including, yes, resistance training with weights – are effective at “injury proofing” players. They expose the players to controlled loads well in excess of what they will experience on the pitch, giving them the musculoskeletal strength and resilience to buffer what they will go through one, two or maybe three days a week.

However, even with the best injury prevention conditioning, monitoring and analysis, injury risk still accumulates over the course of a season when players are travelling and playing multiple times in a week for several weeks at a time. Of the six most-used players (plus Kepa), all but Azpilicueta will be called up for international duty, further cutting into their recovery opportunities while adding to their playing volume.

The Blues face Burnley away, Manchester United at home in the Carabao Cup, 20th place Watford away and then Ajax and Crystal Palace at home before the break.

Turf Moor is always a difficult place to play. Chelsea can put themselves in a powerful position to advance to the Champions League knockout rounds with another win against Ajax. Crystal Palace are always a bogey team, are extremely strong this season and have Gary Cahill.

That leaves the Carabao Cup tie against Manchester United and Watford as the best opportunities to rotate. Lampard may want to capitalize on United’s floundering form and Ole Gunnar Solksjaer’s earlier statement that he will play his youth in the cup tournament to avenge the opening day loss and advance in another tournament. That would leave only the Watford game. However, he may see that as three easy Premier League points if he plays his best XI.

Those are all tempting, but they are all mortgages on his players’ and the squad’s overall health and readiness. He will have to triage his priorities for this upcoming run, with a hard line about letting six players getting at least one game off apiece.