Calum McFarlane says Chelsea will adopt a \u201cwait and see\u201d approach regarding the fitness of Joao Pedro ahead of their final-day trip to Sunderland, but are \u201chopeful\u201d he will be involved along with Reece James and Levi Colwill<\/strong><\/p>\n Forward Joao Pedro was a notable absentee from the squad for Tuesday\u2019s 2-1 London derby victory against Tottenham<\/strong><\/span>having picked up a minor knock.<\/p>\n Club captain James was named on the bench, while defender Colwill was left out entirely as the club look to carefully manage his return after a long-term knee injury.<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n \u201cJoao Pedro had a slight knock,\u201d interim boss McFarlane said.<\/p>\n \u201cIt is nothing that we are massively concerned about, but again, with the quick turnaround from the Manchester City game, it just wasn\u2019t worth risking him in that moment.<\/p>\n \u201cLevi has obviously come off the back of a very serious injury, so it was probably too quick of a turnaround from the cup final.<\/p>\n \u201cWe didn\u2019t want to risk him. We couldn\u2019t afford to risk him tonight, but that would be expected. That would have been the plan from the beginning.<\/p>\n \u201cReece is the same. We had Reece on the bench tonight, but again, coming off the back of an injury and the turnaround from the City game\u2014the type of game that the City game was\u2014we didn\u2019t really want to risk him in that moment.\u201d<\/p>\n Chelsea travel to face Sunderland knowing a victory would secure European football \u2013 possibly in the Europea League \u2013 but it is not yet known whether the trio will feature.<\/p>\n \u201cIt is definitely a wait and see,\u201d McFarlane said.<\/p>\n \u201cWe have a little bit of time from now until then, so we\u2019re hopeful. But we won\u2019t know that until the next couple of days unfold.\u201d<\/p>\n Get the latest direct to your phone \u2013 follow West London Sport\u2019s WhatsApp channel<\/strong><\/p>\n Follow<\/p>\n<\/div>\n <\/p>\n <\/p><\/div>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Calum McFarlane says Chelsea will adopt a \u201cwait and see\u201d approach regarding the fitness of…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":11118,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"pagelayer_contact_templates":[],"_pagelayer_content":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11117","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-chelsea"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/playball.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11117","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/playball.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/playball.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/playball.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/playball.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11117"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/playball.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11117\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/playball.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/11118"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/playball.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11117"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/playball.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11117"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/playball.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11117"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"WhatsApp\"\/](\"https:\/\/upload.wikimedia.org\/wikipedia\/commons\/6\/6b\/WhatsApp.svg\")
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