Roy Hodgson has defended his handling of Michael Olise and his decision not to substitute the Crystal Palace winger before he suffered a hamstring injury late on against Brentford.
Having scored two goals and with a 3-1 win wrapped up, Olise pulled up in stoppage time at Selhurst Park on Saturday and is now facing another spell out.
Palace have not put a timeframe on his return but Olise will miss Thursday’s FA Cup tie against Everton.
Hodgson is understood to have been warned three times by Palace medical staff last month about overusing Olise after his return following four months out with a hamstring injury.
“This has got nothing to do with the [first injury],” said Hodgson ahead of the Everton game. “It is much lower down [his hamstring].
“It is nowhere near where he injured himself - it’s not a reoccurrence. You’ve got to be careful with players.
"You’ve got to be more and more careful these days. There are longer periods in the game where there’s inactivity because of VAR and longer matches.
“We’re coming off a period now where we just played three matches in a week for a couple of weeks in succession, so you are aware of all of those things. But the fact is that, unfortunately, you can’t run your team totally scientifically.”
Hodgson added: “If, for example, someone could have said to me: ‘Michael Olise might pull a muscle in the last couple of minutes of the game, maybe you should pull him off earlier?’ Of course, you would do so without hesitation.
“But, if suddenly, with say 15 minutes to go and Olise is playing like he’s playing. They put the board up [and it says] ‘Olise off’, and Olise comes off and goes: ‘What’s going on? What are you doing? Why are you taking me off? I want to play,’ and the crowd is booing, is that when the sports scientist steps across and says: ‘Well, I told him to do that — I thought it was a good idea.’”
Victory over Brentford ended an eight-match winless run for Palace and eased scrutiny on Hodgson.
“Managers have to win matches”, he said. “How do you do that? You get yourself a good team, you work together with everybody to try to get the best and to make certain that when the players are on the field, they are ready to play, they want to play and they feel fit to play. That’s what we try to do.
“We haven’t yet got to a stage where the game is completely run by people outside of my aegis where, basically speaking, I go into a game going: 'He will play 40 minutes, he will play 70, he can play 80.' What happens if the one playing 80 gets injured after 15 minutes with a pulled muscle?
“Sports science has been very useful to us in terms of analysing what we do in training. I can’t speak highly enough of it.
“But I find it harder to think that we are going to get to a stage where we can definitely compute how long people can play.
“When you get to that stage then the public are going to need a lot of education because, otherwise, they’re not going to really understand why players they really want to see play are being replaced by a player who in their eyes is a much lesser player.
“If I take Olise off and put someone on that people they don’t regard as being anywhere near the same level as Olise, I don’t think the crowd or press are going to understand it. They’ll understand it even less if we lose.”
