Chelsea head to Brentford on Friday night looking to snap a two-match winless stretch in the Premier League, but they will do so without Jo\u00e3o Pedro leading the line.<\/p>\n
Pedro\u2019s availability was already in doubt after he was removed from Brazil\u2019s fall roster earlier in the week. ESPN reported that he is dealing with bone edema in his knee, the result of a sprained ACL, and that he could be out for about three and a half weeks.<\/p>\n
Xabi Alonso did not fully close the door on the forward in his pre-match news conference on Thursday. He said he would \u201cwait until tomorrow to make a final decision on every player.\u201d When asked to confirm the problem affecting his striker, Alonso replied: \u201cno.\u201d<\/p>\n
Even so, Pedro\u2019s omission from Chelsea\u2019s squad, and not just the starting XI, points strongly to a player who is not ready to feature before the international break. Chelsea will be hoping the pause gives him enough time to recover and continue the strong start to his season afterwards.<\/p>\n
Chelsea\u2019s injury list is not limited to Pedro. Captain Reece James also missed out on the matchday squad for the Brentford fixture, adding to Alonso\u2019s selection problems. James had played 90 minutes against Hull City at the weekend, but he was absent from training yesterday. While Alonso kept the matter quiet publicly, England manager Thomas Tuchel confirmed James was not selected for the Three Lions\u2019 upcoming Nations League matches because of injury and was replaced by Trent Alexander-Arnold.<\/p>\n
James joins injured midfielder Mois\u00e9s Caicedo in the treatment room. Pedro and wingback Marco Palestra complete the list of unavailable Chelsea players through injury for the Brentford game.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Chelsea travel to Brentford without Jo\u00e3o Pedro, with injury doubts also affecting Reece James and Mois\u00e9s Caicedo.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":19764,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[728,190,172],"tags":[1836,242,180],"class_list":["post-19765","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-brentford","category-chelsea","category-epl","tag-2026-27-premier-league","tag-injury","tag-player-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19765","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19765"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19765\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/19764"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19765"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19765"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19765"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}