Chelsea’s injured masses progressing, but not in full training yet

Chelsea came into the World Cup break with a laundry list of injured players, and as much as the break itself was an historic and unwelcome disruption to the (European) football calendar, the six-week break looked to be quite helpful in getting the team back into better shape, at least in terms of fitness.

Halfway through that break, we appear to be making progress in that regard, though none of the previously injured players are in full training just yet, as Graham Potter revealed in an in-house interview.

“Reece is not quite fully training but he’s integrating into training along with Wesley.

“Wesley is a little bit further behind but not too far.

“Ben has come back from his individual work in Dubai and he’s now working closer with the guys but still not team training.

“N’Golo is a little bit further away but again he’s progressing well,’

“Kepa is not quite with the team yet but has stepped up his rehab.

“Ruben is doing some work in the gym so we’re hopeful that he can be involved next week but we’ll see how he goes.

“There are lots of players at different levels and that’s the challenge but we’re making progress so that’s the positive.”

-Graham Potter; source: Chelsea FC

So that’s perhaps not as positive as we might have been expecting when we saw all these players travel with the team to the training camp in Abu Dhabi — it would appear most of them will not be playing in the friendly this weekend, for example — but hopefully at least a few of them will be ready to play when the season restarts in less than three weeks. Chilwell and Kanté had longer recoveries planned already, but we had hoped the rest would be fit by the end of the calendar year.