Sam Allardyce has explained his thinking when eaving Alex Song and Diafra Sakho on the bench at Chelsea yesterday claiming past injuries as the reason!
Many were shocked when the club’s two most influential performers both failed to make the starting line-up.
And when they did finally appear after anj hour, the improvement in the team’s previously lifeless display picked up by probably 50 per cent minimum.
The manager, however, was unapologetic declaring: “”Alex has just got back from a problem with his knee and Sakho a problem with his back, so two games in that short space of time would have been very difficult.
“I’m sure they’d have played very well today, but come picking them on Sunday, it might have been very difficult when we considered how they felt.”
Speaking to the official website he added: “We’ve got two games in 48 hours, so people have got to change and rotate their team because you have 22 players that you need to use during any particular period.
You can’t just use them when you’ve got an injury or suspension, that’s not the done thing today.
“Some of our players were, in our educated opinion, not capable of playing two games in 48 hours. We made only three changes, one (the injured James Tomkins being replaced by James Collins) was forced on us, while the other two I have explained before.”
The Chelsea game was a ‘free hit’ really and we didn’t really expect to get much out of it – Arsenal and West Brom games are better targets for points so it is more important for our best players to be available for those games. It goes against the grain a bit for me to agree with BFS but he is probably right.
The only other thing in my mind is that Sakho and Kouyate are definitely going to the Africa Cup so we may as well run them into the ground whilst they’re still available.