Kante returned to the Chelsea side in the goalless stalemate at Wolves on Sunday and played the full 90 minutes.
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Chelsea head coach Thomas Tuchel has provided a squad update for the Carabao Cup clash at Brentford on Wednesday night, with question marks hanging over the heads of certain players’ participation. He confirmed that French midfielder N’Golo Kante will not be involved in the clash, while also stating both Andreas Christensen and Trevoh Chalobah are major doubts. Kante returned to the Chelsea side in the goalless stalemate at Wolves in the Premier League on Sunday and played the full 90 minutes. Tuchel, however, admitted in his post-match interview that it was never the plan to throw N’Golo back in at the deep end after trouble with a knee injury.
“What we did with N’Golo Kante for 90 minutes was close to irresponsible,” Tuchel said in his media conference ahead of Wednesday night’s game, according to their club’s website. “Will he be involved against Brentford? Simply no. We cannot do this and I will not do it. We will now give him time to recover and prepare for Aston Villa and this is the situation.”
However, there was positive news in form of Kante’s usual midfield partner. Tuchel confirmed Jorginho’s availability for Wednesday’s quarter-final clash. “Jorginho had a negative test, it was a wrong positive, so he is back training,” he started.
Providing further injury updates, Tuchel said, “Andreas is very doubtful with injury and the same for Trevoh Chalobah. From the match, we have Chalobah a big doubt. N’Golo Kante and Mateo Kovacic we took a huge risk with, and we now are paying for this. Two matches in one week for them is simply impossible.”
Due to many first-team players’ absence, the Under-23s trained at Cobham ahead of Wednesday’s match, the German head coach confirmed. “We made them come for two training sessions but then we detected that Lewis Baker is positive for Covid. Another player out. This is another risk. We blend some squads and now we have another positive,” he explained.
“The players [with Covid] are okay and this is the most important. They are not back as they have to be out for 10 days before release. This is the concern we have and then they are out, have Covid and we don’t know if they can play or not if it is risky,” Tuchel added.
He was asked about the decision by the Premier League not to call for a fire break in the current season. Responding to it, Tuchel stated, “I thought this was coming. I was not concerned about the bigger picture, we have a schedule, with the Club World Cup, it is not easy to postpone games but for isolated situations like ours in the last match we thought we had a strong case.”
“I shared my thoughts with everybody. We accept the situation and the challenge. We had 14 players and with a lot of them we took a huge risk. We did not feel fully safe. Apart from that, we will accept the next challenge and it will not get easier because these guys are out.”
