Leon Goretzka (26) will also be missing for FC Bayern at the start of the second half of the season. And possibly for longer.
At the beginning of December, he worked hard for 65 minutes to help FC Bayern to victory against arch-rivals Borussia Dortmund. Since then, Leon Goretzka has been on hold, his patella tendon is hurting him too much.
When the reduced squad of the record champions reported to Säbener Straße on Monday for the start of training for the second half of the season, Goretzka again only did his rounds individually. That’s how it continued for the rest of the week. “It’s a difficult issue,” coach Julian Nagelsmann said on Thursday when asked about the condition of the international player.
Goretzka had two days “where it was quite decent”, then one day “where we lowered the load a bit”. On Thursday, “we wanted to increase it again, but it was significantly worse again”. So for the game against Gladbach on Friday, Bayern’s number 8 is definitely not an issue, just: when again?
The important thing is that it doesn’t go on like this.
“We did another control MRI,” Nagelsmann explained, “there was no deterioration, but also no improvement in the findings, which are not so extreme from a purely imaging, two-dimensional perspective. We have sent the images to a specialist, will do another examination and then decide what to do with the knee; whether to continue to try it conservatively; whether we have to look inside to simply see the third dimension, whether there is any structure that causes him problems.
So an operation is not ruled out, “but not yet decided. As I said, the pictures are with a knee specialist in Innsbruck right now. We’ll have another look over the next two days to see what exactly we’re going to do. The important thing is that it can’t go on like this, the condition is intolerable, especially for him, that it’s very wavy and he’s not able to play. At the end of the day, that’s what he would like, what we would like. That’s not possible at the moment and accordingly we have to go other ways to make sure he’s not out for another four, five weeks. “
