Wolves star undergoes surgery ahead of Sunderland clash after missing Brighton draw through injury

Wolverhampton Wanderers defender Matt Doherty underwent surgery last week to correct an issue with his wrist.

The right-back missed Wolves’ 1-1 draw with Brighton & Hove Albion on Sunday, unable to make the matchday squad as he recovered from the process. Doherty has also not been called up to his usual duty with the Republic of Ireland as he aims to make a full return after the October international break.

Doherty first felt the pain in his wrist during the 1-0 defeat away at AFC Bournemouth on August 23, so he was playing through the injury for quite some time. But the decision was taken before the Brighton clash to intervene with surgery as a bone fracture Doherty had suffered wasn’t healing properly on its own.

What injury does Matt Doherty have?

Phil Hayward, the club’s director of high performance, explained the injury and operation to wolves.co.uk at Compton Park recently. He said: “Matt had an injury to his scaphoid, a small bone in the wrist. He fell over when making a tackle and landed heavily on his hand, causing pain in the wrist.

“We had some scans done afterwards and we realised the bone was broken and knew that it would need to be surgically repaired, because the scaphoid is a bone which is known not to repair particularly well without intervention.

“Once the fracture has happened, the damage is essentially already done at that point, so it was a case of finding the right opportunity to do the surgery within a six-week period. We’re towards the back end of that six-week period now from the initial injury, so we decided to go ahead with the surgery at this point.

“A lot of bones in the body will tend to heal themselves without intervention if they are well aligned, but the scaphoid has quite a complex blood supply and once there is a fracture across a certain point of the bone, there's a really high chance that a bony union won’t be established between the two different parts of the fracture.

“In the short term you’re pretty safe carrying on with a splint to protect it against any movement, or any kind of further insult if you fall again, so we weren't overly concerned about any further damage being caused prior to the operation.”

When will Doherty be available again?

There are no guarantees that Doherty will be back in time to play Sunderland on October 18. Different people react differently to surgery, after all. One thing that is for sure, though, Doherty is very keen to return to the matchday squad as soon as possible. When he does, he’ll be eager to retake the right-back spot from Jackson Tchatchoua.

“He's desperate to get back, but obviously, we need to respect the fact that he's had surgery,” Hayward continued. “In addition to actually repairing the bone, there's also a lot of other associated inflammation around that area from the surgery itself, so we need to wait for that to settle down.

“There's obviously some healing which needs to be done on the skin surface as well. We need to get past this early stage then we can start to really push him again. If he does fall on it and cause himself a complication with the surgery, it’s quite a difficult one to undo afterwards, so we have to be careful and respect the advice from the surgeon.

“He should be absolutely fine. The success rate of these surgeries is very, very high, and he should be back training pretty quickly. We can get him going fairly soon with non-contact training and doing things on the grass which don't involve a risk of him falling to maintain his fitness levels while the bone heals.

“Then, as soon as he's ready to go back into competition again and take full contact, he should be good to go and back at the level of fitness that he was at when he when he came out of the team.”