Frank Lampard’s plans to take the FA Cup match against Liverpool as seriously as possible have been dealt a bit of blow by the fact that some of Chelsea’s best players are simply not available.
Obviously, he would very much like to win and advance, but he’s going to have to do so without ... deep breath ... N’Golo Kante, Christian Pulisic, Tammy Abraham, Callum Hudson-Odoi, Ruben Loftus-Cheek and now Andreas Christensen as well.
While Loftus-Cheek was able to complete 90 minutes on Monday, which is great, it means he won’t be playing on Tuesday, which isn’t. But he’s definitely on the right track.
More concerning are all the injuries and the fact that they don’t seem to be going away. In fact, they’re only growing by the day, with Christensen now ruled out as well.
"Andreas Christensen has a small issue, which we’re going to give it another 24 hours but probably puts him out of the game.
”There are no fresh returns from the injury list.
”Ruben Loftus-Cheek is playing in U23s this evening to get 90 minutes or something towards that which should be great for him.
”Beyond that there’s no Tammy Abraham, no Christian Pulisic, no Callum Hudson-Odoi, no N’Golo Kante. [Abraham] went to Barcelona to get another set of eyes on [the ankle], and has come back relatively positive [but] unfortunately he’s unwell at the moment, he’s off for a couple of days with a bit of a bug, so no update.”
-Frank Lampard; source: Football.London
Guess we’ll just have to do this the hard way.