Roy Hodgson says the word 'scan' is giving him nightmares because his Crystal Palace team is in crisis.
Eberechi Eze and Joel Ward have this week joined the long list of names on Palace's injury list, which now includes nine first-team stars.
Hodgson describes Eze's injury as "serious" and a setback to fellow winger Michael Olise's issues mean that Palace are going to be without their two greatest attacking threats for a "considerable amount of time".
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But the recurring theme of players insisting their problems are only a niggle, only to find out after further investigation that it is a long-term problem, is keeping him up at night ahead of today's clash with Nottingham Forest, which will be his 400th Premier League match in the dugout. The only boost is the return to fitness of striker Odsonne Eduoard.
Hodgson said: "When the players leave the field and report an injury, they have all reported that as far as they are concerned, it is not serious; but then they have a scan and it shows that it is serious.
"So, I have got to say that one of the words that cause me nightmares these days is the word ‘scan’ because every scan now seems to involve a tendon and when that is the case, what used to be a one or two week break from football suddenly becomes a six-week break from football.
"There is no sympathy in the world of football for injuries and there is no point seeking sympathy. It happens to all teams.
"We happen to be in the middle of quite a serious injury crisis at the moment but we have to learn to deal with it and accept the situation and look forward to the time when our squad becomes bigger again, when these players return.
"Okay, it is not going to be in the next week or two, but the season doesn’t end until May. We have to keep that in mind as well.”
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But Hodgson refuses to blame the amount of matches that are currently being played for the increase in injuries.
"I'm not so sure there are more games, so we have to be a little careful on that," he said. "It wasn't too long ago that there was a 42-match season. It wasn't that long ago that FA Cups and League Cups had replays, and there were still international games for the players.
"If you wanted to really research it, you could probably go back to the early 60s and find that people like Bobby Moore played many more games than people do today.
"If we are putting the injuries down to anything, I would say 1) intensity and 2) the level of care that players get today.
"There are so many injuries that now take players out and they get rehabilitated over a period of five to six weeks, maybe in the bad old days, we'd have had them back playing in 10 days despite the fact he wasn't fit to do so."
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