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.
