Rodrigo Bentancur diagnosed with strained knee ligament

When you hear a manager bringing up ligaments potentially being involved when talking about an injury, it causes your head to do a fair bit of wandering. What ligaments? How serious have those ligaments been hurt? Is it bad or ... really bad? What kind of recovery time will there be because of all this ligament talk? So many ligaments, not enough time to go over all of the possible scenarios without losing

That was the case when Sarri discussed Rodrigo Bentancur’s condition following Saturday’s 3-1 loss to Lazio, with the 22-year-old Uruguayan having to be subbed off late in the first half due to a knee injury.

And, all of one day later, we found out just what kind of ligament damage that Sarri was eluding to after the loss.

It’s good news based on what it could have been. From Juventus’ official website:

Following the diagnostic tests carried out this morning at J|Medical, this is the player’s diagnosis, who was forced to leave the action early in last night’s game.

During the match against Lazio, Bentancur suffered direct bruising with consequent distraction of the medial collateral ligament of the right leg. Today, he underwent treatments and recovery. The player will be evaluated day by day.

With what Sarri said after Saturday’s loss, were you expecting something with a day-to-day kind of evaluation schedule? Feel free to answer that in all caps if you’re as surprised as I am right now.

Of course, the day-to-day evaluation doesn’t really say how long he will actually be out for — you have to think that he’s probably going to miss Wednesday’s Champions League group stage finale against Bayer Leverkusen in Germany just to play things safe — but a strained knee ligament is basically one of the best-case scenarios that could have been compared to the alternatives.

Which means Juventus might not be in an injury crisis after all.