Harry Kewell was thought to be the Liverpool player most likely to miss the World Cup through injury - sadly that fate has just befallen his best pal Djibril Cisse.
France are quite well off for strikers; Nicolas Anelka and Ludovic Giuly were already fed up at being left out of the squad, so several obvious replacements forl Cisse suggest themselves. Nor was the Liverpool player likely to feature in the French starting line-up. As has been the case at Anfield he was probably going to be used as an impact substitute.
So the French will get by without Cisse, it is the player himself who will find it hard to get over this latest setback. No footballer deserves two broken legs in such quick succession, and no one deserves to suffer such an injury on the eve of the World Cup.
The player's immediate future is now in doubt, with a possible move to Marseille having to be shelved, and there must be a question over Cisse's long term fitness and future. Not least in the player's own mind.
This latest injury may not be as complex as the first, and he should be able to recover from it more quickly, but he will do well to come back as eagerly and energetically as he did last time. He still feels Liverpool have not seen the best of him, and perhaps now they never will.
A good World Cup too, might have changed the public perception of a player who has plenty of pace and a talent for scoring spectacular goals while managing to miss most of the more straightforward chances, but that too has gone by the board, possibly for good.
See also: Paul Doyle: Five simple rules for fixing France's forthcoming fiasco Dominic Fifield: Cisse will be missed
