Arne Slot admits injury at Ekitike
“Alexander Isak has been out for a few weeks. That meant Hugo had to play more minutes than he had all season,” Slot told Sky Sports.
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“This caused him to suffer a slight injury to his hamstring, because we had to play him more and more minutes.
“For a player his age and not completely used to the Premier League, that has been a bit much. That’s why he will be out today and hopefully he will be back for the Arsenal game, but that is definitely not certain yet.”
Starting with the game against Leeds in early December, Ekitike has played 84, 78, 90, 86 and 90 minutes in his last five Premier League games.
Before the match against Tottenham on December 20, the forward had only exceeded 90 minutes once in his Premier League career.
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But the load has been increasing in recent weeks due to the Isak breakdown. Slot could (and maybe should) have seen it coming.
Why didn’t Arne Slot use Chiesa?
Likewise, I should have anticipated Isak’s previous leg injury when he clearly wasn’t capable of playing three times in one week.
The coach made a big mistake with Ekitike’s excess – leading to Liverpool losing their top scorer in the away game against Fulham and potentially Arsenal.
But what could I have done differently?
Well, for starters, take a look at Federico Chiesa’s minutes since that Leeds game at Elland Road. That night he didn’t play at all and in the next five games he played 7, 1, 61, 11 and 5 minutes respectively.
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That outlier is Chiesa’s only start to the season: on the right wing against Wolves, which was certainly a poor performance. And he was recently used for five minutes against Fulham, despite Liverpool’s obvious lack of firepower.
Slot HAS named Chiesa as a potential option through the center of attack, using the Italian’s talents as a sort of “false 9” throughout several substitution spells this season.
© IMAGO – Federico Chiesa Liverpool
Slots players are collapsing
Would it have been too much to ask Slot to use Chiesa a little more time in those substitute appearances? Or, God forbid, give Ekitike a rest and play Chiesa through the middle?
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The worrying thing for Slot is that there is a pattern of him using players until they fall apart this season.
Not only Ekitike and, previously, Isak. It also happened to Dominik Szoboszlai: the midfielder played every minute for his club and country until his injury against Brighton.
And the same thing happened with Joe Gómez; Always a player with a fragile injury history, he played FIVE games in about two weeks before collapsing against Brighton.
Liverpool spent £450m over the summer, but Slot has not seen fit to renew or rotate his team options. Right now Liverpool are counting the cost of that lack of rotation, with Ekitike being the latest casualty.
There has to be a better way to keep the team fit and ready for action, and using Chiesa more would have been the ideal place to start.