October 29, (THEWILL) – Mateo Kovacic has been ruled out for “a few weeks” after injuring his hamstring in training on Thursday.
The Croatian has been a standout player for Chelsea so far this season, but Blues manager Thomas Tuchel confirmed the news ahead of Saturday’s premier league meeting with Newcastle.
“We had very sad news yesterday, he injured himself in the last minute of training and suffered a hamstring injury,” Tuchel said. “He will be out for some weeks because he’ll miss next week for sure and then comes the international break as well.
“It’s a minimum of those weeks. Hopefully, after the international break he can be back.
“He injured his hamstring doing a little bit too much in training, so also it’s my fault. You can call Mateo at three-o’clock at night and call him for tactical training, or set-piece training, or defensive training and he will be there with a smile, happy to do whatever is needed.”
Tuchel also stated that neither Romelu Lukaku nor Timo Werner will be able to return to play until after the international break, urging his team to continue sharing the goal scoring burden in their absence.
“It’s important that we bring bodies to our opponent’s box, that we are brave enough, free enough, to end our attacks with enough people in the box and increase our chances to score.
“In the end, we hope it won’t be Jorginho again who is our top scorer! We like him a lot and it’s no offence to him but we hope that our main guys are our strikers who can score regularly.
“But it’s good that we are dangerous from several positions, we are dangerous from set-pieces and that’s what we want.”
This season, Chelsea has had 14 different goal scorers.
Jude Obafemi is a versatile senior Correspondent at THEWILL Newspapers, excelling in sourcing, researching, and delivering sports news stories for both print and digital publications.
