Rafa Benitez has delivered some bad news when speaking to the press today, revealing that Islam Slimani is not only unavailable of tomorrow’s game against Bournemouth, but will be out for another two weeks – with him suffering a ‘setback’ regarding his recent thigh injury.
A frustrating blow. After missing the trip to Palace and the home game with Man Utd, it now looks like the Leicester loanee will miss tomorrow’s trip to Bournemouth and our game at Anfield two weeks tomorrow.
Here’s what Rafa’s had to say about the Algerian ahead of tomorrow’s game:
“He has had a setback and will not be available for two weeks.
“We have to be careful with him because he had a problem when he arrived.”
“When you go to the last days of the window in this situation, it is always a risk to sign an injured player, but we had to do it.
“Islam was training really hard, he was quite positive & he was training really well. But then he felt this problem again.”
Really frustrating – especially when he had been training ‘really well’ and working hard to recover from this thigh problem.
He’s been spending the last two weeks at the training ground, also training on his own in his homeland to step up his fitness levels, however it looks like we won’t see him until the visit of Southampton on March 10th.
With him unable to play away to Leicester for obvious reasons, this means he may only feature in just 8 games between now and the end of the season.
This isn't Slimani's fault one bit.
A desperate club took a chance on an injured player with little game-time this season…
…on the final day of the January transfer window.
This isn't a policy where we cut corners and save money, it's just bad (and expensive) business.
— Joe Donnohue (@JoeDonnohue) February 23, 2018
A blind man on a galloping horse could see that Slimani’s situation was not going to give us a great deal of benefit.
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