We have seventeen first team players available. Two of those (Fleck and Brewster) have only just returned from serious injury. It's not good.
If you want to look at the submitted 25 man PL squad then it's 15 available as Traoré and McAtee are classed as U21s and therefore don't take up a squad space.
- Adam Davies - out injured
- George Baldock - out injured
- Max Lowe - out injured
- John Fleck - returning from serious injury
- Auston Trusty
- Chris Basham - out with long term injury
- Rhian Brewster - returning from serious injury
- Gustavo Hamer
- Oli McBurnie
- Cameron Archer
- Benie Traoré (U21)
- John Egan - out with long term injury
- n/a
- Luke Thomas
- Anel Ahmedhodzic
- Oli Norwood
- Ismaila Coulibaly - out injured
- Wes Foderingham
- Jack Robinson
- Jayden Bogle
- Vini Souza
- Tom Davies - out until 2024
- Ben Osborn - out injured
- n/a
- Anis Ben Slimane
- n/a
- Yasser Larouci
- James McAtee (U21)
- n/a
- Oli Arblaster (U21/out on loan)
- n/a
- Will Osula (U21) - out injured
- Rhys Norrington-Davies - out with long term injury
- Louis Marsh (U21/out on loan) - out injured
- Andre Brooks (U21)
- Daniel Jebbison (U21) - out until 2024
- Jordan Amissah - out injured
- Femi Seriki (U21)
- Sai Sachdev (U21)
- Jili Buyabu (U21)
If we look at this current snapshot, I think we can identify some broad categories of injury:
Events over which we have no control: ( 5 out of 15)
Max Lowe - trod on sprinkler
John Fleck - leg break through contact during match
Chris Basham - freak incident
Louis Marsh - broken arm during match
Daniel Jebbison - significant illness
Nothing that the club could do about any of these in my opinion.
Hamstrings: ( 2 out of 15)
Rhian Brewster
Rhys Norrington-Davies
I don’t think the club can reasonably be blamed for these. There does, however, seem to be a growing issue with this injury across the Premier League. Important for everybody that it gets better understood.
Major muscle / ligament injury: ( 2 out of 15)
Tom Davies . Quad tear. Most likely the fault of the conditioning programme, in my opinion.
John Egan. ACL. The result of being overplayed while carrying an injury, in my opinion.
Random minor injuries - (the remaining 6 of the 15)
I don’t know enough about the nature or severity of these injuries to try and sensibly categorise in any greater detail, or to speculate on the reason behind each. I suspect that some of them are fairly minor.
To state the blindingly obvious, I don’t think that we can seriously point the finger at any major single cause of our current injury problem. I would argue that at least half of them are outside of any sensible control measure or club intervention. Of the remainder, I would clearly point the finger at the club regarding Egan and Tom Davies. Both of these relate in part to the fact that we have such little depth in our squad. Egan was overplayed because we lacked alternatives, although the international stints were madness ( for which I think both the club and Egan bear some responsibility). Tom Davies - like other of our summer signings - was clearly a mile away from match fitness when we bought him, and I suspect that the intensity of his build-up programme was rushed in an effort to bolster a paper thin squad, and probably played a part in his freak muscle tear while kicking a ball ( similar situation with Slimane earlier).
I doubt whether the other 6 random minor injuries are that much different to most Premier League squads at any one snapshot in time.
I think that I could reasonably conclude from this that bad luck is the major contributing factor to our current injury crisis, and is probably the only clear outlier from the challenges facing other Premier League squads. If this were true, I have two problems with it:
- it seems to have been going on for too long to be a random event.
- there’s nothing we can do about it.
I think that the lack of depth in starting quality of the squad is another factor that causes us to overplay or rush back players, but there’s frustratingly little that we can do about that, at the moment, either!