With a little over 24 hours to go in the summer transfer window, Chelsea are scrambling for solutions to cover for Liam Delap’s hamstring injury — especially as according to The Telegraph, the injury could be worse than initially thought. Delap was assessed immediately after the injury (apparently granted special permission by the league to do so), but that 6-8 week prognosis may prove to be optimistic. Further assessment is required and that “may rule him out for even longer”.
Not great!
Injuries
can happen at any time of course, and if this happened at anytime in the next few months, we would just have to grin and bear it. But it happened now, with the window still open, so we might have a few other options available to us.
One of those is to stop Nicolas Jackson’s loan move to Bayern Munich, though that may be easier said than done despite nothing official being signed yet. Jackson was already in Munich at the time of the injury, and has apparently remained in Munich even after Chelsea revoked his permission for the medical and ordered him to return. Jackson’s agent got all Wolf of Wall Street and they’re not [FUNNING] leaving Bavaria.
Forcing a player back against his will may not be a good thing either way, so that deal could yet resume. Or it may turn into a permanent transfer instead, as opposed to the loan-with-option arrangement currently agreed. That would be an intriguing twist, though it would not help our Delap predicament.
What might help, as per the report, is Chelsea perhaps recalling Marc Guiu, who has already played a couple games for Sunderland (including scoring a goal in their League Cup second round match) but doesn’t look to be in-line for too many minutes as things stand.
Neither Guiu nor Jackson are quite the same type of striker as Delap, which is where the idea of Conrad Harder might enter the thinking. The Sporting CP striker is a more prototypical big man, and he’s a name now under consideration, according to multiple reports including The Athletic. Harder’s a wanted man and Sporting won’t be keen to lose him in the same window as Viktor Gyökeres, so that might be a tough situation to unlock. Panicking into such a permanent solution may not be best advised either; Delap won’t be out forever.
Buckle up; things could get dramatic.
