The irony is hard to miss on Chelsea's midfield issues. The club are struggling to efficiently use their best three players in the role with injuries and system problems making the centre of the park an elephant in the room.
Most of the attention this summer has been on repopulating the defence - understandably so - and overhauling the underperforming attack. Both issues are key and clearly look, on paper anyway, like the two most important places to address. But the midfield really isn't far behind that and with the end of the window approaching and no new concrete interest in buying another midfielder, Thomas Tuchel will have to juggle a lot of factors to keep his engine room firing throughout the season, at least until January.
With N'Golo Kante currently out and still being an injury risk in general, Mateo Kovacic has his own fitness problems and now Conor Gallagher looks unsuited to the role being asked of him. There's serious questions as to where Chelsea go from here.
