For a second Aleksandar Mitrovic looked panicked. He slumped on to his back on the Elland Road turf, his face a grimace, his hands covering his eyes. It was not immediately apparent what had happened: perhaps his ankle had jarred, or his knee twisted, or a hamstring popped.
Fulham’s medical team rushed on to the field. Marco Silva, the club’s coach, has been “managing” his striker’s fitness for weeks, ever since Mitrovic picked up an injury while away on international duty with Serbia. He was taken off early in a defeat against Newcastle. He missed a game with Bournemouth altogether. He has admitted to playing in “a lot of pain”.
Now Mitrovic lay prone for no more than a minute, patiently acquiescing, as the doctors rotated his foot and gingerly stretched his knee. Cautiously, he stood up, doing all he could to put as little weight as possible on his left leg. Watch enough soccer and after a while it becomes easier to tell when a player is exaggerating for effect. Mitrovic’s eyes, fretful and wide, made it clear that he was sincere.
He would not, it is fair to say, just have been worrying about missing the rest of Fulham’s victory over Leeds, or the frustration of the possibility of a couple of weeks on the sidelines. His thoughts would instead have rushed – unbidden and irresistible – to the worst-case scenario. The opening game of the World Cup is barely three weeks away. Coaches will start to name squads, even preliminary ones, in the next two weeks. Any setback now, any pull or strain or tear or crack, might cost a player their place.
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Mitrovic, like a few hundred others, would have wondered immediately if this was the moment he lost his World Cup. In the end there was no reason to worry. The 28-year-old Mitrovic – who will, all being well, act as the spearhead of Serbia’s attack in Qatar – took a little while to satisfy himself that he was not taking any risks, and then threw himself back into the fray. Late on, conscious of the striker’s value, Silva withdrew him, just in case.
Others have not been so fortunate. Qatar 2022′s absentee list is already a substantial one. France will not be able to call on N’Golo Kanté. Lucas Hernández and Paul Pogba, and Raphaël Varane may yet miss out too. Argentina will be without Paulo Dybala. Portugal will not have Diogo Jota in its ranks. Uruguay will have to cope without Ronald Aráujo.
There are doubts too over many more: Marcelo Brozovic and Ángel Di María and so many English right backs that Trent Alexander-Arnold, the Liverpool ingénue so inexperienced that he has apparently yet to learn crucial skills like “tackling,” might even get to play.
There is nothing unusual about that, of course. True, the World Cup has never before happened in the middle of the European season; Fifa, in a rare example of what might, in another organisation, be called wisdom, has never previously thought to ask players to go straight from the blood and thunder of the domestic schedule into an era-defining international tournament with only six days to acclimatise.
But playing the World Cup in its traditional July slot did not make players immune from injury; the three-week firewall between the end of the European season and the start of the tournament did not possess any curative power. In World Cup years those players aspiring to represent their nations have always had to weigh the risks and rewards as the club campaign reached its climax. Few previous tournaments, if any, have been played with a full contingent of stars.
There are, though, a couple of differences this year. The most obvious is the sheer number of games. Ordinarily by April and May most teams are only playing once a week; it is only the select few, competing not only in their domestic tournaments but in the late stages of European competitions, that face the prospect of matches every three days.
This time around, because of the squeeze on the calendar created by the looming hulk of Qatar, everyone appears to be playing constantly. That means players not only have more chances to get injured, but find themselves more susceptible to it. There is no time to rest, to recuperate, to rehabilitate. Sinews are permanently strained, bodies forever on the edge.
The second difference is a little less easily quantified. Few players would admit that, as the season reaches its conclusion, they dial back their intensity just a little, conserving their energies for a tournament still a couple of months away. That, after all, sounds troublingly close to confessing to coasting.
And yet it seems impossible that the majority – those not competing for trophies or jostling for European positions or to avoid relegation – would not do just that. It is too easy to overestimate the margins in elite soccer, to assume that everything can be measured in substantial, chunky percentage blocks. In reality, of course, the differences are so slender as to be barely perceptible. A player with the World Cup at the back of their mind does not run at half-speed, or refuse to tackle; they simply do not burn further into the red when their body is at the limit. They do not shirk a tackle, but they may not go in with quite as much force or to quite the same extent. They shave the edges. That is not quite so easily done when the season is still taking shape, and ambition remains more potent than reality. Fulham sits seventh in the Premier League, after all, and are in the tick of the battle for a place in the Europa League. The consequences of not making that sprint, of not going for that tackle, could yet be considerable. This is a time when taking risks still comes with a reward.
That may not be how everyone sees it, of course. This season is developing to be a reasonably curious one, to say the least. It is not just that Fulham sit seventh in the Premier League. It is that Liverpool appear to be playing while mired in treacle, and Tottenham seem underpowered, and Chelsea and Manchester United have both come across as somehow inhibited at various times.
It is that Union Berlin are top of the Bundesliga, with even mighty Bayern Munich trailing in their wake, and with Borussia Dortmund nowhere to be seen. It is that Juventus and Inter Milan have fallen by the wayside in Italy already, cast aside by a rampant Napoli. It is that Barcelona and Atlético Madrid are already out of the Champions League, and Spain left with just one representative in a tournament it has dominated for a decade.
All of this might just be the curiosities that always come with a new campaign, the vicissitudes of fate, the changing of the seasons. Each of those stories, after all, has its own, deep roots. Perhaps it is all just noise.
Or it might be that, on some level, nobody wants to be Kanté, or Jota, or Dybala. They do not even, if they can help it, want to be Mitrovic. And so the typical strangeness of the new season has become more pronounced.
It might be that, for the last couple of months, what has unfurled has been to some extent a phoney war, contested by combatants with a different conflict in mind. – New York Times
