After Kieran Trippier and Yerson Mosquera suffered injuries in Wolves’ Championship opener against Blackburn Rovers, director of performance Phil Hayward has provided an injury update.
The two defenders face a spell on the sidelines, but Hayward provided a positive update on Rafiki Said, Jean-Ricner Bellegarde and Sam Johnstone who are all nearing a return to action.
Kieran Trippier
“Unfortunately, during the game on Friday night Kieran suffered an injury to his left MCL, the medial ligament of the knee, not dissimilar to Rafiki's injury a few weeks ago, although this is a lot less severe. It's unfortunate that he's going to be out now for a number of weeks. He will be in a brace for the next week and had an injection on Wednesday to try and speed up the healing process, but he's going to be out for the next few weeks as he rehabs from that. Obviously, we'll push him as quickly as we can, but it's going to be a few weeks before he’s back on the pitch unfortunately.”
Yerson Mosquera
“Towards the end of the Blackburn game Yerson had a problem with his ankle. He had a scan on Sunday and has a high ankle ligament injury. It's not a particularly common ligament injury and it's not a complete tear to the ligament, which is good news, however he will still be out for a few weeks. He'll have an injection this week to try and speed up the healing process, he'll be in a boot for the next couple of weeks and will then need a few weeks off training, unfortunately, so it's not great news.”
Rafiki Said
“Rafiki’s doing really well. He's been working very hard in the gym for the last few weeks with his brace on. He's now out of the brace and the most recent scan looks great, so he's heading, certainly, in the right direction. He's now on our anti-gravity treadmill, which allows him to run with decreased body weight, and will do that for the next few days before we get him back outside next week. It will be straight lines to start with, and then gradually progressing him into off-centre work and then start to increase the amount of ball work that he's doing another week or so after that. He's heading the right way and is doing really well.”
Jean-Ricner Bellegarde
“JJ is also back outside now, so he's doing really well. He has progressed really nicely. He has been doing lots of strength work and his strength scores are excellent. He's now back outside doing ball work again. We've always got to be a bit careful with these kinds of hamstring injuries, not to put them back in too quickly, because when they're exposed to maximum sprint speeds, that's when there is a high risk of reinjury. We need to be quite careful to control the high-speed work, but everything up to that point he’s doing lots of now. He's definitely working hard on his fitness, doing a lot of ball work, doing a lot of things that the players with the team will be doing, but we're now just really trying to control that last phase of his sprint speed for the next couple of weeks. He's heading the right direction and doing really well, so he’ll be back with the main group in another couple weeks’ time.”
Sam Johnstone
“Sam's done great. He’s been back in training now for a number of weeks. He started doing modified training about three weeks ago now and handled that really well. It gradually progressed his exposure to positions that would really stress the structures in the shoulder that were operated on. He's managing everything absolutely fine and has full range of movement, he's doing great. There's a couple of small movements in some ranges that he feels are still a little bit difficult for him, but in the main he's feeling very good. He is back to pretty much full fitness, and I would say in the next week he'll be back to what we consider full fitness.”
