I’m a Chelsea fan. And I hope it’s not.

Is [insert non big-6 that has found some success recently] playstyle unsustainable are one of the most lazy journalism anyone can write.

• our squads still not fully padded out

• we weren’t humbled by BD at all, we took the game to them and if Joe’s header went in it would have been 1-1

• It’s a group of death. Only 4 in our squad has CL experience. And we have more points than Man Utd with their easier opposition (BM excluded)

• Burn falling on his back, Murphy on his shoulder, these aren’t caused by intensity. This happens

As long as VAR stays fit we’ll be fine

Are any of the injuries really attributable to that?

You can do anything with VAR on your side :)

No idea why this is downvoted 😂. Chelsea have been plagued with injuries and no-one has questioned it.
Barnes, Burn, Murphy and Anderson were all freak injuries that can happen anytime and not related to playing time. Tonali is also non football related. Targett’s injury he’d played 1 minute and barely played all season. Basically that leaves Isak, Wilson and Botman who are both victims of “intensity”, which in itself doesn’t account for the fact that more games is more chance of pickkng up knocks. Willock was injured last season so doesn’t count. Joelinton and Longstaff both picked up small injuries early in the season before the multiple game weeks.

So it is indeed lazy to insinuate that intensity and number of games has resulted in huge injury list.

This is the next step to becoming part of the “big 6” clubs, being able to handle Europe and the league together. We’ve seen other clubs like Leicester, West Ham, Southampton, Wolves struggle to balance both together.

We did it last season and finished 4th and got to a cup final. We are suffering injuries this season, but that’s not because of our tempo. Plenty of successful teams have played at this tempo, in fact it’s where we/Howe drew inspiration from.

It happened in Klopp’s early years at Liverpool.

Once the playing style is well established you need to gradually build a squad of players that can handle the intensity and have excellent durability.

As good as Wilson, Barnes etc are I’m not sure they have the durability for a team that plays intense football across 4 competitions.

Well the rules have been changed this year and every match is going longer. Some teams, it will suit less but I can’t see why anyone would expect fewer injuries as a result.

Lots of teams are struggling with injuries and ironically enough, Newcastles injury list isn’t that different in length to when Steve Bruce was in charge while constantly on holiday there.

Nice try Mikel.

Lots of injuries.

Once a a weekend yes. If you want do it twice a week you probably need a bigger squad in order to rotate.

I wouldn’t say many of our injuries this season are from the intensity? A lot of them seem freak injuries

Also in a lot of games we aren’t playing as high a pressing game for 90 mins seem to pick and choose when we do it in game we have often sat deeper in our half

Only played 3 extra games so far as we got a bye from the first League Cup game so its not a massive amount of games but yeah I think it will catch up with us unless we can get a few players on loan from Saudi in January… kidding !!