Head of Medical and Sports Science Stijn Vandenbroucke issues his latest update – in association with Spire Roding Hospital...
Hello everyone and welcome to this week’s From the Treatment Room.
We will start with news of Winston Reid, who suffered a injury in training on Friday, and unfortunately the Premier League game at West Bromwich Albion came too early for him. Winston has been training this week individual and will join team training after the cup game and be available for selection against Southampton on Sunday.
As you will have seen by the video he posted on social media, Aaron Cresswell is progressing well with his recovery from a knee injury. Aaron has been working on the pitch with rehab fitness coach Eamon Swift and will step up his work by training with the Under-23s in controlled sessions next week.
If everything goes well and to plan, Aaron will re-join first-team training during the international break.
Andre Ayew and Diafra Sakho are both progressing well and have been running on the pitch. We will introduce the ball to their rehab work soon, but it is too early to put an exact timeframe on their return to first-team action.
Finally, Andy Carroll is progressing well in his recovery from the knee injury he suffered at Astra Giurgiu in August and will start training with Eamon during the final stages of his rehab ahead of joining first-team training.
Sometimes it is difficult with certain injuries to put an exact timeframe on how long a player will be unavailable for, and in those cases we try not to raise expectation by mentioning a date by which we expect a player to return.
In this age of 24-hour news coverage, the internet and social media, there is obviously a high demand for this kind of clarification but, on occasion, it is not possible to satisfy this demand because the return dates are too difficult to predict.
With all injuries, the initial diagnosis can tell us what the problem is and, as a medical and sport science team, we have an idea of how long an injury will make a player unavailable, but it is never an exact science.
Stijn Vandenbroucke
Head of Medical and Sports Science