How should Chelsea line up against winless Barnsley in the Carabao Cup third round?

Actionable injury news in football are hard to come by even in the best of times, but combined with Frank Lampard’s unwarranted habit of overly optimistic prognoses, it’s practically impossible these days to truly gauge when we might be getting players back from injury.

Best I can guess, Thiago Silva has a decent chance to featuring this midweek, against winless Barnsley from the Championship in the third round of the League Cup, but none of the other walking wounded will be ready. That includes Hakim Ziyech, whose small knee injury is now going on almost four weeks, Christian Pulisic, whose six-week hamstring has suffered a setback and is now into week eight, and Ben Chilwell, who’s at least back in training, so he’s probably somewhat close, but hasn’t kicked a ball in anger since the start of July.

Andreas Christensen will be unavailable as well, due to his red card on Sunday. While yellow cards are competition-specific, red cards apply to all domestic competitions, so Christensen will serve his one-match ban in this game.

We could of course pull up any number of youngsters for this game, too — or even some from the forgotten discard pile, like Drinkwater or Bakayoko — but it’s unclear if any have joined the first-team training this week. We’re not really hurting for numbers, even with the injuries.

Choose wisely.

(Live results)