Carney Chukwuemeka undergoes knee surgery, but not expected out for too long?

Bad news first.

Carney Chukwuemeka did indeed injure his left knee in Sunday’s game against West Ham United, going from the ultimate high of scoring his first goal for the club — his first professional goal in fact! — to the ultimate low of a potentially significant injury. (Strangely enough, same thing happened to Wesley Fofana last season.)

Chelsea have confirmed today that Chukwuemeka has undergone a successful operation on his left knee, and will now begin his rehab. As usual, the official confirmation lacks any real useful detail about the nature of the injury or how long we might expect the recovery to be.

But the good news is that reports all seem to agree that we “expect” only a six-week absence for Chukwuemeka (two of which will be an international break), which would be amazing for any sort of knee surgery. I’m struggling to think of any knee procedure that would have such a short recovery time (relatively speaking). Perhaps he just had some arthroscopy done to clean up something in the joint that got dislodged or chipped on Sunday? But that’s just a guess.

So, if the reports are correct, we may have dodged a big bullet here. Chukwuemeka had made an excellent start to the season after a solid preseason, starting our first two games. We were not the same team without him on Sunday.

His absence will hurt, especially after already losing Christopher Nkunku and Reece James for the foreseeable future, but it sounds like we may have avoided the worst.