If he is on the roster for the first game of the season, he’s almost certainly going to be the starter on the left side of midfield.
The presence of Adrien Rabiot is one of them. How the midfield lines up in his absence will depend on a couple of things. Going into the season, Pogba was one of two locks in the midfield, along with Manuel Locatelli. How Juve decides to address the depth chart will also go a long way to seeing how Pogba’s spot in the starting XI is filled. Leandro Paredes has been linked with a potential move to Turin all summer, and Radio Radio has reported that the club has approached Roma about the availability of another Frenchman, Jordan Veretout, who is surplus to requirements at Trigora. That could come in the form of keeping all three of the Miretti-Fagioli-Rovella triumvirate, with the potential to loan them out for playing time come January. At the time, the idea of riding this out with the midfielders on the squad was more plausible, but in the worst case scenario some more depth is going to be necessary. We discussed this for a while in this week’s episode of The Old Lady Speaks, but that was before the prospect of Pogba being out until after the World Cup was a thing. Assuming the worst, and that Pogba is out for the medium- to long-term, how does the team go about replacing him? Regardless of how it ended up coming about, the fact is that it’s happened, and now the team is going to have to deal with the aftermath. If they didn’t, then it indicates that the front office thought they could somehow ride it out, which suggests either arrogance, wishful thinking, or a bit too much focus on off-field matters, which, at least in my eyes, would deduct a few points from the ledger of the Maurizio Arrivabene/Federico Cherubini regime. If Pogba’s knee was already unstable, how did Juve’s medical staff, which was overhauled and supposedly improved after the shocking number of injuries the team dealt with last season, miss that in his medical? If they did, that suggests a stunning level of incompetence. We need to be clear that that’s not at all confirmed, BUT, if it is in fact the case, it raises a ton of additional questions. There have been scattered reports suggesting that Pogba’s injury problems at Manchester United stemmed in large part from issues with his knee that compounded until the current tear finally formed. I, for one, had always been a little bit leery of Pogba’s recent injury history - one that over the last two years had been even worse than that of Paulo Dybala, the man he’s essentially replacing on the roster.
But as an observer, there is a large part of me that wonders why Juventus even let ourselves get into this mess in the first place. The latter would likely result in a more stable joint, but would keep him out until the new year - and, critically, rule him out for France’s defense of their World Cup title in Qatar. The former would get him back on the field quicker, but could lead to even more problems down the road. He could either have the injured piece of cartilage removed, or he can have it repaired. If the injured meniscus is indeed as bad as the doomsayers in the media say it is, Pogba will then have a decision to make as to how he wants to handle it. What was initially reported as an innocuous training knock suddenly turned into two months on the sidelines, which in turn suddenly transformed into the prospect of not seeing Pogba play a meaningful game for Juventus until 2023.Īs the shock of such a crazy turn of events wears off, dejection is replaced with a bunch of questions, the most important of which is, what should the team do next?Ī lot still depends on the final evaluation of Pogba’s knee. It’s the feeling that bounced around my brain every time a new report rocketed around the Twittersphere, each one adding heft to the snowball rolling down the hill. That’s how I felt as I first read that Paul Pogba had left training due to an injury a day after he was so impressive in his first game back in a Juventus shirt last week against Chivas. “But everyone is having such a good time!” Major Strasser, alarmed at the display, orders Captain Renault to close the establishment, leaving the police captain to utter one of Casablanca’s many immortal lines: Victor Laszlow had just led the bar in a stunning, tearful rendition of La Marseillaise.
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