Liverpool star Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain is unlucky, not injury prone.
Ever since the news broke that the midfielder picked up a knock during the preseason training camp in Austria, there’s been plenty of anger and frustration circulating on social media.
I get that, because Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain can be a player who elicits that sort of emotion.
When he plays well, he makes football look so simple and he really adds something different to Jurgen Klopp’s midfield – but those days have been too few this season.
To call him injury prone glosses over one very important fact – he still played 43 games in all competitions during 2019/2020.
That’s not the mark of an injury prone player, no matter what anybody says.
Oxlade-Chamberlain still carries the tag from his time at Arsenal. Between 2013/2014 and 2016/2017 picked up 10 separate injuries, and so you could say he deserved the sick note monicker.
At Liverpool, things revolved around that horrible ACL rupture he sustained against Roma in the Champions League. But those can happen to anyone, it was completely random, and the Ox has done well to come back from one of the worst injuries that can happen to a footballer.
To play 43 games and over 2,000 minutes this season is excellent work from a player who is learning to trust his body again and a player who is learning how to hit the heights we saw from a dynamic, exciting player before that Roma game.
He missed five matches this season and was out for less than three weeks in total, which doesn’t strike me as the numbers an injury prone player would generate.
In 2018/2019 it was just 10.
If it wasn’t for that lost 12 months, Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain would have built on his encouraging start to life at Liverpool and may have even be pressing for a more important first team role.
Frustrating? Yes. Inconsistent? Yes. But this player is unlucky, not injury prone and he shouldn’t be attacked for it.