Richarlison has been out of action for three months, but it seems the Brazilian forward could be back in action very soon based on Ange Postecoglou’s latest comments on the matter.
Richarlison needs minutes
The 2023/24 campaign was a big improvement for Richarlison, who ended up bagging 11 league goals for Spurs (Transfermarkt).
That included a purple patch where the forward registered nine goals in eight games at the start of this year. But, injury issues prevented him from playing and performing consistently.
The 27-year-old missed the final three games of the season due to a hamstring injury, and has been unavailable all summer having not taken part in any of the pre-season matches.
But, the latest comments from Postecoglou suggest we could be seeing Richarlison on the field sooner rather than later.
He told Football.London: “Yeah, Richy is good. Obviously, he hasn’t played at all, so that’s the match minutes, we’re gonna have to try to get that into him over the next few weeks, but he’s trained fully. He doesn’t feel any effects of the injury, which is really positive for us. As I said, everyone else is in a really good place.
“Obviously, a few of the guys came in later last week, but even those guys, I think it’s probably benefiting us playing on Monday, still another couple of sessions. We had a really sort of strong session today for a Thursday, if we were playing Saturday, nowhere near as as strong as we did.
“So we could put some little meaningful work into the guys today. So I think having the Monday game helps us so I think most of our guys should be in decent shape on Monday evening.”
Richarlison has competition in attack
Of course, one of the major obstacles standing in Richarlison’s way now when it comes to getting those minutes, is the arrival of Dominic Solanke.
The 26-year-old striker was signed by Spurs for £65m and is expected to lead the line for Postecoglou this season, with Richarlison providing competition and cover as the number 9.
It had been heavily suggested that Spurs were ready to cash in on Richarlison this summer to fund that move for Solanke (Football Insider). However, the player himself made it clear he did not want to leave the club and wanted to fight for his place (ESPN).
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It’ll be great to have Richarlison back firing and it will be very interesting to see how that dynamic plays out between him and Solanke in the forward area. I would imagine Solanke is the starter, with Richarlison an impact sub now.
There’s no reason why the latter can’t still put together a decent run in the team and deliver good numbers again this season.