Things are looking up

By: Anthony | October 17th, 2008

Over the past couple weeks of internation duty we have lost several major key players to injury and it seemed like we would barely have enough men to field this Sunday when we travel to Almería. With Kanouté limping off in his match for Mali against Chad, to Chevantón feeling discomfort in his knee when he came on for Uruguay in their loss to neighbours Argentina, and finally Drago who tore his bicep muscle playing for his native Serbia. To add to all of this, Diego Capel is still injured and will be for the next 2 months from the injury he picked up in training 2 weeks ago, Luis Fabiano is also still injured from our away victory at Atlético a couple weeks back, Adriano, Renato Crespo, and Fazio are all also out with minor knocks and strains.

The team wasn’t to be discouraged though as Romaric, Duscher, and Acosta have all come out saying that they will prove themselves worthy of being in the starting XI and it is also a good chance for other players to shine. Duscher even went as far as saying “people won’t even realize Capel and Kanouté are missing from the squad”… Oh how I wish i was as optimistic as Aldo is. Acosta has no doubt looked lively for the couple times he has started or come on as a substitute this season, and De Mul had a tremendous olympics playing for Belgium where they lost in the quarters to Nigeria. None the less, it would be good for all these young guys to get some quality minutes and against some tough opposition.
Yesterday Fabiano was declared fit to play on Sunday by Dr. Muñoz who said he no longer has any problems and as a result he returned to full training. Jímenez however, said he would only play a few minutes if he did come on because he wants to rest him for the UEFA Cup match this Thursday at home to Stuttgart. Cheva and Kanouté as well as Fazio were also said to be almost at full strength and should be back to play against Stuttgart.

Just when all hope was lost and i thought we would be struggling this weekend, things are starting to look up again and we now have a pretty decent lineup going into Sunday’s game.

Predicted lineup for Sunday @ Almería:

——————Palop—————–
Konko—Squillaci–Escudé—Navarro
——Duscher—–Romaric——–
Navas——–Maresca——-De Mul
—————–Acosta—————-