:format(webp)/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/54802997/632303330.0.jpg)
Danny Rose will not play for Tottenham Hotspur again this season. The club announced via social media that Spurs’ left back, a PFA player of the year finalist, has had exploratory surgery on his injured knee and will be out until 2017-18.
INJURY UPDATE: We can confirm that Danny Rose has undergone exploratory surgery on his left knee today. pic.twitter.com/SKZRff12aR
— Tottenham Hotspur (@SpursOfficial) May 16, 2017
He recently returned to training, however the problem has not resolved fully therefore a decision has been made to proceed to surgery. pic.twitter.com/RcN7S6mYhN
— Tottenham Hotspur (@SpursOfficial) May 16, 2017
Danny has been out for months now with a bum left knee, which has meant that Ben Davies has had to do the heavy lifting for most of the second half of the season. Rose had just returned to full training, but obviously he wasn’t responding to treatment in the way the club hoped.
So there are two completely fair reactions to this. The first is to get mad at the club. If Spurs’ physios knew there was something wrong with Rose’s knee that might require surgery, it probably would have been better to do the surgery months ago so that he could begin the healing process and possibly come back sooner. The fact that they’re waiting until now feels an awful lot like what happened with Erik Lamela’s hip, where they tried to do everything EXCEPT surgery, and he ended up missing most of the season anyway.
But on the other hand, there are legitimate reasons why they might have opted to wait. If Rose was touch and go with his rehabilitation (or, to borrow a phrase, “90%”) and there was a decent enough chance that they could get him healthy enough to contribute to a Tottenham title push, then it might have been worth the risk of rehabbing him in time for a couple of matches at the end of the season.
That scenario is now moot. Spurs have locked up second place in the table and now have two dead rubber matches this week at Leciester and Hull City. There’s no need to save Danny for anything, and it sounds as though his knee isn’t responding in the way the physios hoped. Surgery it is!
Plus, Spurs describe this as “exploratory surgery,” which implies that maybe they’re not quite sure what’s going on, but scans didn’t show any obvious, serious damage. We don’t know, it’s all supposition.
Recovering from knee surgery during the off-season isn’t such a bad thing, either. It might make his pre-season this coming summer a little more grueling than it might have been otherwise, but with luck this will permanently fix his knee and we’ll get our old Danny back. I don’t want to think about a season at Wembley without him.