Jose Mourinho’s injury crisis got worse at the weekend, with Steven Bergwijn picking up an ankle injury.
There’s no real clarity on when the player will return for Tottenham, although Mourinho made it clear the situation isn’t good.
Inevitably, this has been covered widely in the Netherlands, and there’s not a great deal of surprise. The 22 year old was out for a couple of weeks in September, and then longer from October, and there were serious doubts around his fitness levels before he moved to Spurs in January.
Dutch journalist Sjoerd Mossou spoke on Fox Sports on Monday and suggested he saw this situation coming. SoccerNews.nl quote him as saying: “Is it very strange how it’s gone? In January, they said at PSV that he was not fit. He was a few kilograms overweight, and it was not just transfer things for that.
“My colleague Maarten Wijffels has reported on it a number of times and at PSV they really said weeks ago: it is inevitable that he will be injured.”
De Telegraaf sound brighter about a return date than some other media outlets, and they explain that full examinations can’t yet take place because of the swelling.
It’s not ‘immediately obvious’ that Bergwijn will be out for months, and they tell a story of him once being carried off on a stretcher, everyone assuming he’d be out for weeks, only for Bergwijn to start PSV’s next match.
The Dutch newspaper believe Mourinho presented the worst case scenario, without really knowing anything with certainty, because he wanted to make Tottenham’s injury crisis seem as bad as possible.
