- McConville played 90 minutes against Italy days after returning from injury.
- Slimane and Ahmed face a two-day turnaround from Toronto to Norfolk.
- Clement contacted national-team coaches to manage player workloads.
Philippe Clement may or may not be enjoying the international break, but what he will be doing is stressing over whether those who return will do so with a clean bill of health.
Ten first-team and academy players are away on duty, and with over a dozen names on the injury list, there is now added jeopardy. And the Championship resumes on Good Friday, when City host Portsmouth; those travelling players have almost no time to recover.
For a head coach who is trying(probably in vain) to keep a play-off push alive with seven games left, every tackle, every long-haul flight and every extra minute on the pitch potentially comes at a cost.
McConville’s knee under the spotlight
The most obvious one is Ruairi McConville. The defender only recently returned from a knee injury sustained in the FA Cup defeat at Leeds, missing the home wins over Sheffield United and Preston before coming back for the final two Championship matches before the break.
Last night, he played the full World Cup play-off semi-final for Northern Ireland against Italy in Bergamo, a 2-0 defeat that ended his country’s qualifying hopes. He still has the ‘consolation’ match against Wales to contend with, but Clement will be hoping Michael O’Neill manages his minutes carefully.
The Toronto problem
The Toronto ‘contingent’ offers more a logistical problem as well as a fitness problem. Anis Ben Slimane and Ali Ahmed are both in Canada, where Tunisia face Canada in a friendly in the early hours of Wednesday morning UK time – just two days before City play Portsmouth.
Clement has already spoken of his frustration:
“It’s weird for me that after international duty where everybody goes away, that you have already a game on the Friday. That has never happened before in other countries,” he said.
“If you have players playing Tuesday and Wednesday on another continent that is far, far away, then you need to get them back, and probably they will not even be here on time to train on Thursday.”
He also pointed to an even more extreme example. Mo Toure, now injured, would otherwise have been required to fly to Australia for two friendlies and back.
“That’s 24 hours away to come back. It’s impossible to play on Friday then, if you play on Wednesday morning at 1am or something, with the time difference. I think this league needs to think about those things also,” Clement said.
The concern is not just about missing the Portsmouth game. It is about players returning fatigued or carrying minor injuries that carry through to the final weeks of the season.
Talking to national-team coaches
Clement said he has been proactive, contacting managers of his international players directly to try to limit the damage.
“We try to explain that, and we try to do that with all the national teams, because a lot of the guys are also preparing for a World Cup. But to go to a World Cup, you need to be fit,” he said.
“If they play two games and then need to play on Friday again, and you see with our squad that we don’t have much space for rotation, then you have a much bigger risk that the player gets injured. Then everybody loses, the club but also the national team.”
He described the conversations as productive but declined to share details, saying he valued the discretion of those talks.
No margin for more knocks
The state of the squad beyond the travellers explains why those minutes matter. BeSoccer’s current injury list includes Ben Chrisene, Pape Diallo, Toure, Oscar Schwartau, Jovon Makama, Matej Jurasek, Harry Amass, Lucien Mahovo, Shane Duffy, Mirko Topic, Jeffrey Schlupp, Ante Crnac and Gabe Forsyth.
Clement said he expects Chrisene and Jack Stacey to be available after the break, with Toure and Schwartau also previously tipped to return. Getting those players back would help. But another fresh injury to a returning international could put him back to square one.
“The more competition, the better,” Clement said of the expected returns. The flip side: less competition means less margin for error, and right now, there is almost no space for player rotation.
Counting the minutes
Jose Cordoba is with Panama in South Africa for two warm-up games. Kenny McLean is on Scotland duty for friendlies against Japan and the Ivory Coast. Kellen Fisher is with England Under-21s. Eroll Mundle-Smith and Elliot Myles both received first call-ups for England Under-20s and Wales Under-21s, respectively. And Zach Baumann (Ukraine U19s) and Vatan Ozcan (Turkey U19s) are in UEFA elite-round action.
Feels a bit like a knife-edge scenario. Let’s hope, for once, the footballing gods will be kind to Big Phil (and us).
