Nedum Onuoha column on Tottenham’s injury crisis

From experience, your playing schedule is likely to have far more impact in terms of injuries than your team’s playing style.

Playing games every three or four days, and going on international duty as well, adds up over time, but it becomes a bigger issue when you have a few injuries to deal with too.

The hardest thing in football comes when you are never able to get on a run of games because you are never really match-fit.

The more people who are like that in your squad, the bigger the problem is, and the greater the likelihood is of getting recurring injuries.

Manchester City’s issues with their centre-backs this season is a prime example of that. In the past, the likes of Ruben Dias, John Stones, Nathan Ake and Manuel Akanji have all been rotated by Pep Guardiola, but they have largely been selected – or not – by choice.

This time, they have all suffered injuries that have seen them come in and out of the team. It has largely only been one little niggle after another, rather than anything long term, but it has still had a massive effect.

When you have a full squad available, you can make little changes the way City usually do and, as a consequence, spread out the workload and allow people to come in and out of the team.

But if you have a few injuries, including the ones you pick up randomly from bad tackles, which are out of your control and are the element of bad luck I mentioned earlier, things can quickly snowball.

From the moment you are missing a few players the situation can escalate the way it did for City and Spurs, because you are left with so few fit senior players that you cannot rotate them to try to help them out.

Instead, you are stuck in the same cycle and things are more likely to get worse – even when you are doing things for the right reasons.

Nedum Onuoha was speaking to BBC Sport’s Chris Bevan.