You know how Guglielmo Vicario’s stats and metrics have been dropping like a stone this season, going from statistically one of the best shot stoppers to one of the worst in the Premier League in recent months? Turns out there’s a reason for that — he’s likely been carrying an injury for months and been playing through the pain.
According to an article in Football.London and citing Vicario’s Instagram, assistant coach Fabian Otte replied to a Vicario post after his hernia surgery and implied that he’s been dealing with this for a while now.
Months? MONTHS? Well, that certainly explains a few things. That statistical drop was dramatic, and fanalysts had already picked up on it. It was suggested that Vic’s performance drop was due to him being on a bad team that faces more shots than before, or that he was just having a bad season, or maybe was reverting to the mean after overperforming since joining Spurs.
But this suggests something different, and depending on how you view things, infuriating. Playing through injury is rarely a good idea, and Vicario’s stats seem to prove that. I mean, it’s already a bad season and it’s a little tricky to try and unpick how Vicario’s regression is intertwined with Thomas Frank and Igor Tudor’s tactics, the regression of the team as a whole, and the injury itself. It’s probably a bit of everything. It’s also impossible to know whether the team would’ve been better off if Vicario had had the hernia surgery much earlier and put the club in the hands of Tonda Kinsky for a few weeks. Maybe it would’ve been better, maybe worse. Who can say!
This is not going to do anything to appease the section of the fan base that is convinced that Spurs’ medical staff are comprised of cloned copies of Dr. Nick from the Simpsons, or mannequins with cleavers instead of hands, and they have a point — it’s a little infuriating to learn that your starting, and struggling, keeper has apparently been playing through pain for months in an attempt to help the team, when he might have actually been doing the opposite. Add another narrative point in This Effing Season™ I guess.