At Empoli Pogba was in his second remnant of a game of the season, after only 161 minutes played last year. Children of a fragility born already in the days of Manchester
How much there is to worry about or not will be revealed by the investigations in the next few hours: when you experience an ordeal like Paul Pogba’s you lose all security and every little pain is not an alarm bell, it is the siren of an ambulance. But it has not escaped that while his teammates celebrated under the curve for the victory in Empoli, the Octopus left the field together with the club’s doctors. “He felt discomfort in the back of his leg,” said Allegri. The same leg as the bandaged knee, the right one. The Frenchman then remained on the field until the end, managing himself. The stop of the championship now comes in handy, but as soon as we saw him stop in the middle of the field, withdrawing his leg after a tackle with Bereszynski who was missed due to pain, the fear of yet another season of the via crucis lit up in everyone’s head .
at the roots of fragility
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The beginning of everything is traced back to that July 23 of the 2022 American tour, a pang in training translated by the instrumental checks into that lesion to the lateral meniscus of the right knee which with a notorious push and pull was first tackled with conservative therapy and then with an intervention that ended up denying Pogba the World Cup in Qatar. The reality is that the Octopus is a physically fragile player already from just 27 games played in his last year at United and from 22 of his penultimate season in Manchester.
the constant stops
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In his first year with Juventus, attendance sadly fell to 10, for a total of 161 minutes, never more than half an hour of use. Between continuous stop & go children of muscle relapses that came from knee problems: the groin strain that postponed his debut last season from the bench at the end of January with Monza to his effective return in the derby at the end of February with Turin, from the injury to the adductors at the beginning of March to his return in mid-April and the cautious recovery of confidence with the field, up to the new thigh injury which ended his season prematurely against Cremonese in mid-May, only to see him return to the field with the new season three months and a half later.
new year, old life
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In any case ahead of time, because his debut in this 2023-24 season seemed destined to arrive after the break for the national teams which begins now, instead in the days leading up to the first of the championship here are the flashes in the test against Alessandria: in Udine it is not took the field, but played 24 minutes plus recovery with Bologna and these 28 plus recovery at Empoli, those of the new stoppage. Moreover in a remnant in which he had also scored, if Vlahovic’s side had not been offside. “Pogba needs to be managed and sipped, in the sense that he’s coming off an injury and he hasn’t played for a year,” Allegri said on the eve, and it’s no longer even a question of being good or bad prophets, of thinking about bringing good or bad with what they say, because now it’s always like this with Octopus, since he returned to Juve. Even if it weren’t anything to worry about, in any case he expects a future for him knowing that he has to manage himself. But at least, if it were just a scare, it would help not to erode those certainties that are now reduced to a minimum.
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