Reece James facing Chelsea crossroads as he targets return after injury hell

If Rio Ferdinand is right, Reece James’s phone will have been buzzing off the hook for much of Wednesday morning as England’s players chased the low-down on their new manager Thomas Tuchel.

“I know for a fact these players will be sitting there ringing each other,” former England defender Ferdinand explained on his social media channel Rio Reacts. “They’ll be calling all their mates that played under him. ‘What was he like?’. That’s what the conversations will be.”

For James, who won the Champions League under Tuchel at Chelsea, an England recall may just have gotten a little more likely, but remains, for now, a long way off. The aim, as it was at the start of the summer, is more straightforward: “I have one goal. My goal is to stay on the pitch.”

In the same international break as Tuchel was signing his new contract with the FA, James - who has not started a game for England in more than two years - was making his latest return to Chelsea training, desperate once again to put years of injury frustration behind him.

Having recovered from the hamstring surgery that wiped out most of the second half of last season and ruined any chance of going to Euro 2024, James played a prominent part in the Blues’s pre-season, only to suffer another hamstring injury in the final minutes before he was due to be substituted at the end of the club’s US tour.

Even then, the hope was that his absence would be brief - James was already due to be suspended for the first three Premier League games of the season - but instead it has taken until after the campaign’s second international break for the 24-year-old to rejoin Enzo Maresca’s group.

Maresca will, presumably, take a cautious approach with a player who has made just 19 league starts since the beginning of 2022-23 but, when fit, is still among the club’s two or three best. It remains to be seen whether he will even be ready to be among the substitutes for Sunday’s trip to Liverpool.

Broader picture, though, there is only so long Maresca and Chelsea can afford to wait.

This summer, with Malo Gusto having impressed last season, the club decided not to sign a new specialist right-back in the hope that he and James would dovetail. Already, though, with James sidelined they have been exposed by a minor injury to Gusto, which left Maresca using the likes of Axel Disasi, Moises Caicedo and Tosin Adarabioyo out of position around the last international break.

There were priority needs elsewhere last summer, most of which were addressed, as a fine start to the season shows. But as Chelsea’s squad gets stronger and becomes more balanced, the number of positions in need of reinforcement each transfer window ought to shrink and if James cannot stay fit then perhaps as early as January, there may be a serious question about whether to recruit.

Chelsea could rely on their club captain for just 482 minutes across competitions last season and none at all so far this term. Their squad is deeper than most, but Maresca’s wish for two players competing for each position is hardly unjustified, given a marathon campaign may not conclude until the Club World Cup final in mid-July.

Chelsea are desperate for James to come good and rediscover the form that made him perhaps the division’s best full-back under first Frank Lampard and then Tuchel, not least because he has four years left to run on a contract worth a reported £250,000-a-week.

Get back on the park for Chelsea and by the time Tuchel names his first England squad almost five months from now, James may well be worth a place.