The problems were brought into sharp focus at Wolverhampton on Sunday when a lack of central midfielders led to the deployment of N’Golo Kante and Trevoh Chalobah (with Mateo Kovacic coming on) despite minimal training after injury or Covid, and it remains to be seen if any similar situation arises at Brentford tonight, but ahead of this cup meeting, Tuchel has thrown further light on how he is choosing his teams.‘I don’t say I am going to put you in. I ask the players how do you feel. We're talking here,’ he explains.‘Who am I to say you play? If the player is not ready to play he does not play. We're discussing here every single player, how many minutes do we think, what did he do in training.

‘Of course it's a calculated risk but it is a risk. In an ideal world N’Golo would not have started [at Wolves] and for sure not 90 minutes. In an ideal world Kova would have done training at Cobham but with every single central midfielder out, it was a choice to take and with every single striker out, there's another choice to take.‘It's like this and with other defenders out, you have to overuse some players to be competitive. Nobody needs to cry for us. It's just the situation.’Tuchel acknowledges that an alternative would have been to include Academy players in the team rather than the likes of Kante and Kovacic, and this where the overall risk factor is being calculated.‘We talked to our medical department, we talked to the player and then we take the risk,’ he emphasises.

‘I can clearly see that people look at our squad and think this is a strong squad, but I said before the [Wolves] match this is the situation and it will not hold us from having the highest demands of our performance and of our players on the pitch. We have a strong, tough team on the pitch and we will fight for the win, which we actually did, and still we took some risks.‘Hopefully I don't catch Covid but if I did, I'm not sure after 10 days that I go for a run straight away. or do sports like Mateo Kovacic did.‘I put him on the field so I took the risk, I could have left him at home so we would have arrived with only 13 players and took one from the Academy, which is already shut down because of Covid.

‘So when we speak out we have reason to speak out, we're not speaking out because we're missing the two big strikers and we cannot accept to have players injured or out.’Tuchel emphasises the degree of care is such that Kai Havertz was left out against Everton despite a lack of strikers and a negative Covid test, because he was feeling ill, and Jorginho was sent home into isolation when there was doubt over his test result.‘So we're taking care, this is what we do. We want to have our best team but it was a concern because it backfires on people who should not play so many minutes.’