Antonio Conte admits he is worried about Lucas Moura's injury as football.london understands the Brazilian suffered a new setback this week after returning to training for Tottenham Hotspur.
The 30-year-old has not featured for Spurs since August, having suffered inflammation in his tendon, leaving Conte without the experienced attacker in the Premier League and Champions League. Lucas has had good and bad days with the pain, but was on the way back and had trained most of this week after seeming to have recovered during the international break.
However, in training ahead of the North London Derby, football.london understands that Lucas suffered a setback on the pitches at Spurs' Hotspur Way training complex. The Brazilian has since been unable to train and Conte is concerned over when he might be available for selection again, particularly during this frantic run of 13 matches in 43 days ahead of the winter World Cup, a run of games that began with Saturday's 3-1 defeat at Arsenal.
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"You know very well that now we have to play every three days. We have to move on and we have to hope we don't have any more injuries. Today [Dejan] Kulusevski was out, Moura I'm really worried because he's really far to recover," Conte said in his post-match interview with SpursPlay.
"When you have injuries up front then you are in a bit of trouble. It's important also to recover Ben Davies and fingers crossed not have other situations because for this reason I always say you need a big squad to fight and to go and win something. You can see this when you start to play every two to three days.
"If the squad is really strong, it's deep to face all these competitions. I repeat, we do our best and we will continue to do this and now we have to move on quickly and on Tuesday it's an important game for us.
"We are playing in the Champions League. In the last season with two games to go we overcame Arsenal and Arsenal is playing the Europa League and we are playing Champions League. We have to take also the positives from this game and understand that we need to work and try to improve."
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