Less than Two days to go before West Ham travel to north London and Julen Lopetegui has been providing the answers in his customary pre-match press conference. It comes at the end of another international break which has seen Hammers players disappear across continents and oceans to represent their national sides.
It is always a time managers or head coaches dread as players pick up injuries through the stresses of long-haul travel and high level physical performance being crunched together.
What is worse for West Ham is that some of their squad members haven’t reported back for duty yet – Thursday afternoon – after yesterday’s reports of aircraft being chartered for Mohammed Kudus, Michail Antonio and Edson Alvarez in order to try and get them back in time.
Kudus in particular faced the challenge of returning from Libya – other international squads have recently been kept sitting waiting 18 hours for delayed flights without food or water: Grim for the players and chaotic for the coach trying to find his starting eleven!
Lopetegui admitted as such in his conference:“It is true that we have a lot of players in a lot of countries and right now we don’t have them all here. Until the last moment we will not be all together, which is always difficult”.
And the squad are not due to train until 4pm this afternoon so Lopetegui doesn’t even know which of his ‘returners’ are fit or which might be carrying knocks.
Sounds like chaos lurks behind the scenes and underneath the calm exterior he portrayed at the conference – with less than two days to try and pull everything together for a lunchtime Saturday start. Don’t you just love an international break. And the good news? There’s another one in November.
The amount of international games before the end of October has actually been pathetic.
Whilst we have players still not back from international duty it’s hardly behind the scenes chaos. Most of the other premier league clubs have exactly the same problem it’s not only us. Over dramatic I would say.As for Kudus his situation will not be a standard flight out he is not at Gatwick or Luton
That chaos is the same for the Spuds, the Spuds play with a predictable shape albeit the players rotate positions within it, in theory it’s relatively easy to plan against, I suspect they will look to exploit our fullback positions as Lopetegui also have an easy to predict way of setting up with fullbacks high up the pitch.
I hope he starts the players that didn’t go away, i.e. Summerville, Soler and Rodriguez, maybe even Guillherme can bring Kudus and Alvarez on from the bench, Soucek didn’t have any huge travel, could play Ings or Bowen uptop instead of Antonio who is usually a mess after returning from International matches, god knows why at this stage of his career he wants to waste it on uncompetitive international matches…
Same for a lot of prem teams. It’s not as if the ‘chaos’ is ours alone. At least now we’ve got a bigger squad to pick from.
Chaos lol just an excuse every other premier league team faces the same problem so no excuses is acceptable.. So if any player feels tired or unprepared don’t pick them.
Actually I don’t agree, Paul, Getting Mohammed Kudus out of Libya is not the standard challenge facing premier league teams. The whole Nigerian team was stranded last weekend https://www.adomonline.com/super-eagles-pull-out-of-afcon-qualifier-after-libya-airport-nightmare/