Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: a Tottenham Hotspur player has picked up an injury!
The eagle-eyed amongst you may have noticed one conspicuous absence from Spurs’ matchday squad as they took down Brentford 2-0: that of Destiny Udogie. Djed Spence started the match at left back, with Ben Davies and Kevin Danso the only defensive cover on the bench. Thomas Frank confirmed prior to the match this was due to injury, and he elaborated further in his post-match conference:
All the quotes are pretty much there in the Twitter post. In short, he picked up an injury against Newcastle, it’s a “soft tissue” injury, and it probably isn’t serious.
Oh boy, here we go again.
So the good news is that because the injury was sustained in the Newcastle match, Destiny has probably received all the requisite scans and assessments, so Frank’s assertion that Destiny will not be absent for long carries some weight. The bad news? Everybody lies (thanks to Dr. Gregory House). The fact that it’s a soft tissue injury also indicates some kind of strain, as opposed to an impact injury, and tissue injuries can often be worse: we’re likely talking some sort of calf, hamstring, or groin tweak.
And that’s where things get worrying. Obligatory I am not a doctor declaration aside, though the timeframe for recovery from a mild strain of this nature tends to be in the realm of weeks as opposed to months, these injuries can recur quite easily without the proper rehabilitation (and even with it); and Destiny Udogie’s injury record now reads like a laundry list of ailments. This is his third injury stint just this season, and over the last three seasons he has missed around 36 matches due to injury (based on Transfermarkt’s tracking of injury data).
I guess what I’m saying is I am starting to get a bit worried about Destiny’s fitness at the top level. He seems to pick up more niggles than most, and typically these are the sort of injuries that increase in their frequency as a career progresses. There are exceptions to this rule, of course - some footballers can miraculously shake off injury-prone labels as they age - but this tends to be accompanied by other sacrifices in some area of those players’ games. We saw firsthand with Harry Kane how he bounced back from a number of ankle issues to almost never missing a fixture; but at the same time, his sprints and pressing decreased greatly in matches. Was that worth the trade-off? Probably. Does a fullback like Destiny Udogie have that same luxury? Probably not.
For now, though, Destiny is young and it does seem like there are some improvements going on at Spurs in this space. We know there has been a further medical department revamp, and previously injury-prone players in the form of Micky van de Ven and Richarlison have been surprisingly robust this season (touch wood); so maybe things aren’t all doom and gloom. At the very least, here’s hoping that Destiny can return to the pitch soon; and that this is the last knock he suffers this season!