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Insider: Maxwel Cornet missed 'huge' opportunity to become 'bulletproof' at West Ham
The winter break was a fantastic opportunity for Maxwel Cornet to return to fitness and push on at West Ham but he’ll now struggle for robustness this season.
That is the view of medical expert Ben Dinnery, who runs the Premier Injuries site and spoke exclusively to Football Insider about how a lack of winter training will affect West Ham’s Ivorian winger in the second half of the season.
Cornet joined the Irons for £17.5million in the summer [Sky Sports] and looked to be an exciting addition to David Moyes’ side, but he’s not been spotted in the Premier League since October 1 after a series of calf injuries that started during his full debut for the Hammers.
As quoted by football.london on Thursday, Moyes told media that Cornet has visited a specialist in Paris after injections still failed to help the ongoing issue, and the mystery of his continued problems could lead to surgery.
Dinnery believes that the winter break seemed like a perfect time for Cornet to put his injury issues behind him, and that his latest setback this month will see him struggle to build up any robustness this season.
“Cornet’s situation is a very difficult one,” the injury expert told Football Insider’s Sean Fisher.
“We’re talking about a player who had a fairly innocuous setback against Wolves.
“It didn’t look to be anything sinister but here we are a couple of months down the line and he’s still not really pushing towards first-team contention.
“A preseason block of training forms a cornerstone of a player’s robustness for the rest of the campaign and this mid-season break afforded players a huge opportunity to get that accumulative training load in their legs to bulletproof them for the remainder of the season.
“Once again, Maxwell Cornet has missed that opportunity following his latest setback.
“So straight away we’re talking about a lot of red flags there with Maxwell Cornet following the several setbacks, and the opportunity has passed him by in terms of getting that really good block of training in his legs.
“Because once you’re in the cut and thrust of the Premier League, and particularly you know the second half of the season where there are going to be more fixtures than we’ve ever seen before, then you know there are opportunities to get back up to speed and really push to be in contention.
“Then David Moyes will have to, as with all managers, take a little bit more of a risk than they would ordinarily because they see the opportunities to maybe blood and bed those players in.“
In other news, Gabby Agbonlahor issues a ‘toxic’ claim about West Ham and David Moyes this season