The Saint-Etienne season is a painful procession punctuated by injuries. This week it was the defensive midfielder Zaydou Youssouf who left the squad until the end of the season, due to an injury to the left knee (internal lateral ligament). The last of an endless list. “There are only three or four players who have not been injured this season (*)”, William Saliba noted this Wednesday afternoon at a press conference.
At the end of November, the central defender was himself one of the eleven unavailable members of the workforce (metatarsus). This time, there will be six of them who will not be able to join Claude Puel’s group for the trip to Nancy, where ASSE will meet Épinal (N2) this Thursday in the quarterfinals of the Coupe de France: Hamouma, Monnet-Paquet, Nordin, Khazri, Boudebouz and Youssouf, therefore.
The latter was the victim of a relapse: “A serious injury in the same place as that which had left him on his side for a few months in Bordeaux. There has been a recurrence, there will be an operation. He got hit on it, but that’s not it. It turns out that he did not find his knee perfectly stable, and even if he did not feel pain he was examined by the surgeon and his ligament was too distended. It was decided to think of the player first. “
“What do you want me to tell you?” There are few clubs that have made as many matches as we do ”
The ASSE coach refuses to link this cascade of glitches, which started before his arrival at the club, to flaws in the preparation of his team. “When there are muscle injuries, we can possibly ask ourselves questions, he asserts. After when there are fractures in the nose, hand, metatarsus, it’s still problematic. I don’t mind trying to find the noises, the little beast. But I still find that we are not spared. I don’t know if it’s a season like that but there is no point in epilogating, constantly coming back to it, rehashing. We will do with valid players. “
And when we insist, he adds, in a breath: “What do you want me to tell you?” There are few clubs that have made as many matches as we do. Saint-Etienne started very badly, there was a physical refresher which was interesting, we redid matches which were full on the physical level. Then we went on every three days and then the players got injured. It’s a bit of a lack of balance. When you have a few players who are injured, you tend to shoot a few others and then it incurs injuries. It’s a bad spiral. I don’t like the word fatality, but I prefer to focus on able-bodied players ”, who will be responsible for taking the Greens to the semi-finals of the Coupe de France for the first time since the 2014-2015 season.
(*) Only Loïc Perrin, Harold Moukoudi, transferred in January to Middlesbrough, and Yvann Maçon, who arrived in January from Dunkirk (N), did not miss any L 1 match due to injury.