By Chris Wright
It’s been confirmed this afternoon that Andros Townsend has officially seen his World Cup aspirations all but certainly go up in smoke after being ruled out for the next ten weeks with an ankle injury.
Townsend came on for the last 10 minutes of Tottenham’s 1-0 win over Stoke but left the Britannia in a protective boot afterwards having knackered his ankle ligaments – as his x-rays later confirmed.
The World Cup starts in six weeks-ish (42 days to be precise) and Roy Hodgson has confirmed that he will announce his 23-man England squad on Monday, May 12th, so, with the aforementioned 10-week lay-off in mind, it’s not looking particularly good for Townsend.
Personally, we couldn’t give two figs that he won’t be on the plane as we really don’t rate him as being much more than an okay lower-Premier League/upper-Championship-level wideman – though it’s definitely a kick in the yams for a player that, in all fairness, performed well enough for England (on a relatively sporadic basis) during the qualifiers.
Thankfully, however, this cloud does have a silver lining – as at least the Spurs winger can now devote his time to properly protecting his watercress collection…