There are always a few Premier League press conferences on a Thursday rather than Friday lunchtime, presumably so that all the news in the division doesn’t arrive all at once.
That’s fair enough, but it seems silly to have a team playing on Monday night doing their presser on a Thursday, as was the case with Chelsea today.
It just means really we have no idea over the status of some players and whether they’ll be available. Conor Gallagher is ill, but may train tomorrow and be ready for Monday. Marc Cucurella is racing to be fit for a first start since December, but it’s hard to know at this stage whether he’ll be back to fill in for the freshly hurt Ben Chilwell.
As it stands, our best guess would be that Cucurella isn’t risked, and we see Malo Gusto on the left and Alfie Gilchrist on the right, with Thiago Silva and Axel Disasi on the right.
That really is a dodgy setup – about none of those four would be in the first choice back 4, and the best of them (Gusto) will be playing on the wrong side.
