Tottenham Hotspur’s Erik Lamela to undergo surgery, miss rest of season

Erik Lamela is done for the year at Tottenham Hotspur. The club announced via social media and on its website that the Spurs’ Argentine midfielder will undergo surgery on his hip on Saturday and will be out for the remainder of the season.

The club went to say the following on Lamela:

The Argentina international has undergone a comprehensive rehabilitation process following the injury in November.

The player has achieve​d a good level of function, however he has been unable to reach the stage required to make a full return to training.

Therefore, following ongoing extensive consultation with specialists, surgery has been agreed by all as the best course of action.

This will result in Erik returning to action next season.

You ever have one of those days where you work on a fun article only for it to be rendered more or less irrelevant ten seconds before you post it? Hi, it me. But actually, this is the most clarity we’ve received on Lamela’s situation since he first picked up that injury against Liverpool back in October, and it can be called good news, even if it means that Erik won’t play again this season.

We can infer a couple of general things from the club’s statement. First, it implies that surgery was the last-case scenario here. We don’t know for sure whether it was the club or Lamela (or both!) who were hesitant to do surgery earlier, but it implies that they wanted to exhaust all other options before putting him under the knife. That’s extremely similar, as I mentioned in my earlier article, to the Kyle Walker hernia situation back in 2013-14/2014-15. If we continue the parallel, it hopefully implies that this will give Erik the best chance of achieving a full recovery.

Secondly, it suggests that Spurs aren’t done with Lamela, and aren’t going to sell him this summer. If they were going to offload him, he wouldn’t be having surgery at all, and the club probably would have continued to be mum about his situation up until the summer, at least.

Third, it’s confirmation that there’s really nothing else going on. Really. Honest. There’s no failed drug test, there’s no clinical depression. Erik just had a bad injury that probably needed surgery a while ago, but they didn’t want to cut him open until they were sure that the darned thing wouldn’t just heal on its own.

However, it’s not all scalpels and roses. There’s the lingering question as to why Spurs went through the whole rigamarole of sending him to Roma earlier in the season. Dan Kilpatrick at ESPN just tweeted that there still appear to be some lingering issues between Lamela and the Spurs physio staff.

It’s still a bad situation for Lamela, who will have to endure another “lost season” due to injury, and coming off of a campaign that was easily his best as a Tottenham player. There are further questions to be asked about his role in the side going forward, but all that can wait until he gets healthy.

Best wishes to Lamela as he recovers and returns to full fitness.