Ben Davies ankle injury could require surgery

Tottenham Hotspur have yet to play a match this season without a first team player being injured. Now we can officially add Ben Davies to the list. Spurs took the unusual step of providing an injury update to Davies’ status, saying that he sustained ankle ligament damage, and that he could require surgery to fix it.

Davies was injured in the second half of Spurs’ 3-2 win at West Ham United, Jose Mourinho’s first match in charge of the first team. It didn’t look that serious at the time, but it’s quite obviously worse than anyone though. That’s a shame, considering Davies was starting to round into something close to form and was probably Tottenham’s best left back at the moment.

There’s no indication for how long Davies will be out, so we’ll just call it “for the foreseeable future,” which is vague and frustrating and maddening. It means that Danny Rose is once again Tottenham’s inarguable first choice left back. Beyond that, it’s an open question — Jan Vertonghen can and has played left back in the past for Spurs, and Ryan Sessegnon is also an option, though we have yet to see him in that role. It’s also possible that if Vertonghen is preferred we’ll see something akin to the lopsided formation we saw against West Ham where Serge Aurier was given license to move forward and Davies would tuck in to form a back three.

Mourinho will need to figure something out, though — whatever his options are, it won’t do much good to run Danny Rose into the ground with the holiday fixture crunch coming up.