Kante’s knee injury leaves Sarri stressing over his midfield picks

Chelsea head into tonight’ s Europa League final against Arsenal still sweating over N’golo Kante’s fitness, with manager Ma urizi oS arri admitting his midfield woes have left the team “in trouble”.

Sarri insisted he would give Kante, pictured, as much time as possible to prove his fitness, but only rated the France star as “50 -50” at his pre -match media briefing last night. Jorginho, Mateo Kovacic and Ross Barkley will start should Kante miss out.

“Kante had a very little problem with his knee,” explained Sarri.

“The problem is the timing, because we have only four days. We are trying. It’s not really a very serious injury.

“We have the problem of the three, four days to try to recover him. But at the moment we don’t know. We will try, until the last moment. “So we will try tomorrow, but we don’ t know. I think he is 50-50 at the moment. Yest er day ,60-40 against, and now today 50 -50. He was a little bit better this morning.” Sarri added: “We are in trouble with the mid field. At the moment we have only three midfielder sf or three positions. So we are in trouble.

“For us N’golo really is very important. He is the only defensive midfielder that we have. So for us Kante is really very important, we are trying to recover him.

“We’ll try tomorrow morning. I hope to recover him because I know without N’golo for us is a problem.”

Sarri’s future at Chelsea has been in doubt for some time now but the former Na po li coach pledged to ignore rumours linking him with a summer move to Juventus.

“Of course this match for the media is the most important of my life, but probably not for me,” he said. “Probably a match in Serie B was more important for me.”

Asked directly if he could end up at Juventus next season, Sarri added: “I want to think only to the final of course, then I have a contract with Chelsea for two years. So first of all I will speak with Chelsea, but this is not the moment. Now we have only to think to the final.”