Tottenham’s World Cup stars beginning to return to training

Tottenham Hotspur still have three players in the World Cup semifinals — Ivan Perisic, Hugo Lloris, and Cuti Romero — but the rest of their international stars have exited the tournament along with their national teams. That means that we should expect a number of players to return to London to start training ahead of Spurs’ upcoming match against Brentford on December 26.

In fact, a few players have already rejoined team training. Writing in the Evening Standard, Dan Kilpatrick says that both Pierre-Emile Hojbjerg and Rodrigo Bentancur are supposed to rejoin the team for training today, though heavy snow in London might delay their return. Son Heung-Min, meanwhile, is scheduled to return on Wednesday; while Kilpatrick doesn’t mention Pape Matar Sarr, Senegal exited the World Cup in the same round as Korea, so it would serve to reason that he would return about the same time as Sonny.

Richarlison, Harry Kane, and Eric Dier meanwhile, only started their week’s rest post-World Cup and both are slated to return to the side a week from today, which would give them another full week’s training before the Boxing Day fixtures.

For the remaining three, it’s probably safe to assume that none of them will be available to feature against Brentford. All four semifinal teams have two matches yet to play including the final and third place match, so assuming they’ll be given the same amount of rest as their colleagues, the absolute soonest they’d return to the side would be the 26th, and that’d be without any training ahead of the match.