Chelsea boss Frank Lampard blasts Didier Deschamps over N'Golo Kante injury: 'It's not a laughing matter'

Groin injury: Kante will miss Saturday’s Premier League home clash with Newcastle
AFP via Getty Images
James Olley18 October 2019

Frank Lampard has criticised France manager Didier Deschamps’s handling of N’Golo Kante during the international break by claiming a “a lack of communication” over his groin injury is “no laughing matter”.

Kante will miss Saturday’s Premier League home clash with Newcastle due to a problem sustained in the warm-up before last Friday’s 1-0 win against Iceland.

The 28-year-old then failed a fitness test before Monday’s 1-1 draw with Turkey but was not released back to his club – a decision Lampard admitted his irritation over given Kante has struggled to be available all season.

Kante was withdrawn from last month’s matches against Albania and Andorra over fitness concerns after lengthy dialogue between club and country but Lampard claimed the same level of communication was not in evidence this time.

“Before the international break, I know Didier Deschamps mentioned in jest a little bit about Olivier Giroud [not playing regularly for Chelsea] and I get it – we all have our selection problems,” said Lampard.

“He had his in those two games himself. But the Kante one was not a laughing matter because we communicated before the last international break because he was injured. He couldn’t go so [we said] ‘let’s think of what benefits the player’. He didn’t go and we both agreed on that. “That’s how things should work. After the first game when he pulled out, he then had a fitness test the day before the second game. It was clear he couldn’t play but he then sat on the bench on the evening of the game. That’s not communication. That’s not such a laughing matter I suppose. And It is more for Kante himself because he is not an inexperienced player who hasn’t been around the block. He’s won World Cups, he’s been a fantastic player. So I think that could have been handled better.”

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Kante has started just five matches this season and when asked whether he had spoken directly with Deschamps, Lampard said: “Our doctors were speaking and there were some times when things weren’t coming back to us as I’d expect them to. That’s what I mean about communication so even though we joked about the communication, from the time before that it was better to build it as opposed to not.

“We’ve got a player back a bit later. I understand when players are away on international duty, they are their players as such but it was quite clear he wasn’t fit to play. From our point of view, we would have wanted him back to work on him.

“But its been and gone and as with every international player, I will always try and have open lines with communication with the manager for both our sakes. For Kante, in the first squad, nobody would have benefitted from him going. Me, him or France. We had to think about the long term and the care of the player. I get that it is a bit of a grey area.”

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