Sunderland will be without 11 senior players when they travel to Stamford Bridge on Sunday, David Moyes has revealed.
Paddy McNair, Duncan Watmore, Jan Kirchhoff, Steven Pienaar, George Honeyman, Wahbi Khazri, Jason Denayer, Victor Anichebe and Papy Djilobodji all missed the midweek trip to the Emirates Stadium.
And they’ve been joined in the treatment room by Lamine Kone and Didier Ndong.
“I will approach this game the same was as I approached Arsenal; we want to win and put in a good performance,” said Moyes.
“The big problem is there are 11 senior players out injured for this game meaning I’m nearly back to the worst time of the season.”
He continued: “Kone, Denayer, Papi, Kirchhoff, Honeyman, Khazri, Ndong, Pienaar, McNair, Watmore and Anichebe [are out], so I think it’s about 11 that won’t feature due to injury.
“We’ll have to try and put a bit of a patched-up team out to make sure we get a positive performance, like it was against Arsenal for lots of reasons.
“We didn’t get the result but we were obviously playing a team who are at a higher level than us.”