Huge blow as Chelsea add four players to injury list ahead of Burnley game
Chelsea have been hit with four new injury concerns ahead of their Premier League clash at home to Burnley on Saturday.
Earlier this week, Chelsea confirmed that £58 million summer signing Romeo Lavia will miss the remainder of the season due to a thigh injury.
And on Thursday, Chelsea announced that Carney Chukwuemeka, Robert Sanchez, Trevoh Chalobah and Ben Chilwell have all been added to the club’s injury list.
Chalobah is currently in light training, while both goalkeeper Sanchez and Chukwuemeka, who returned from an ankle injury earlier this month, are ‘undergoing a rehabilitation programme’.
Chelsea are also without Reece James, Levi Colwill, Wesley Fofana, Lesley Ugochukwu and Christopher Nkunku.
Chilwell, meanwhile, suffered a knee issue during England’s 2-2 draw with Belgium on Tuesday evening.
‘We need to assess a few players like Chilwell who came back from the national team after playing two games, after he didn’t play with us, he got a knock in his knee,’ Pochettino said during his press conference on Thursday.
‘Today he was all right to train and now we will see what happens tomorrow, if he can be available to be in the squad or not. We need to assess him.
‘I don’t know if I was surprised he played both games. He could not play for us, because he didn’t play after Brentford, he only played a few minutes in the game against Leicester in the FA Cup.
‘It was a little bit a situation when he starts two games, maybe it’s a surprise for us, but it’s bad luck because he got a dead leg in the last moment of the game against Belgium. Now we need to struggle because we need him to play in our club. That is another piece of bad luck that we have because now we need to assess if he can be available or not.’
When asked about Lavia’s setback, Pochettino said: ‘It’s a really difficult situation for him and of course he’s sad, he’s not happy. He’s only played 30 minutes, for a player who arrived new in the club.
‘It’s something that sometimes happens in football. When the club signed him he arrived with problems from Southampton. Now it’s a different problem than the one he had from Southampton.
‘In nine months he was only with us training for a few weeks. He arrived and he could not train and then when he started to train with us he suffered an injury to his foot.
‘After he was training with us again for a few weeks, he was available at Wolves but didn’t come on and then against Crystal Palace he played 30 minutes and got injured in his quad. From December we haven’t had the possibility to train with him, because he was never really close to being available.
‘It’s really sad news because always a new player when he arrives at a club wants to perform, wants to help the team. Now we need to wait for the next pre-season and the next season for him to be available again and try to help the team. For sure we are going to help him to become stronger and be available for pre-season and then next season to show his real quality.’
