Football
ESPN staff 9y

Everton's Leighton Baines ruled out for 1-2 weeks with hamstring injury

Everton have confirmed that Leighton Baines could be back in Premier League action against West Ham next weekend as the hamstring injury the left-back suffered on England duty is not as serious as first thought.

Baines, 29, was forced to withdraw from Roy Hodgson's squad for the Three Lions' Euro 2016 qualifier against Slovenia on Saturday and Tuesday's friendly against Scotland after picking up the injury in training on Friday morning.

But the Toffees have revealed the injury is not a long-term problem, stating on their official website: "[Baines] returned to Finch Farm for an assessment which has since showed that he has sustained a 'grade one' hamstring injury -- the least significant on the scale of such injuries.

"Baines will continue to be monitored by Everton's medical team and, although he remains a doubt for next Saturday, he has not yet been ruled out of the game against Sam Allardyce's Hammers."

Hodgson chose to leave Manchester United left-back Luke Shaw out of his squad for the games, a decision he is now ruing following Baines' injury.

He said: "Kieran Gibbs is the one to come in as unfortunately we had given our squad at 11 o'clock as we are duty-bound to do to UEFA and, because there were three left backs, I left him [Shaw] out of the 23 as we had 24 players at the time. As it turns out now we can't use him."

Hodgson said he understood the rule about naming his squad, but had hoped UEFA would show some flexibility to allow him to recall Shaw after Baines' injury occurred less than half an hour after the deadline to submit the 23 names.

He said: "I can't pretend that I think it's a great idea that you have to name 23 players almost 36 hours before the game because training injuries do occur and people do get injuries and fall sick.

"I would like to think that if you are allowed to have 23 players in your squad that you should at least have the right [to] a little bit longer than 36 hours ahead of the game.

"Having said that, I did know about the rule. My hope was that because we were only 25 minutes late when we applied to bring Luke back into the squad that maybe UEFA would look at that and say, 'It's a reasonable request and we can show some flexibility,' but they decided that wasn't possible, that the rule is the rule, and that 11 o'clock is the deadline and because the injury occurred 25 minutes past 11 we missed it."

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