Juve training continues, first injury reports crop up

Preseason training continues apace at Continassa, as Juventus look forward to their first preseason friendly on Saturday against Serie C side Cesena. As has been the case for much of training, the Bianconeri did athletic work, mostly without the ball.

With the return of Massimiliano Allegri comes many things—and unfortunately one of those things will likely be muscle injuries. Allegri’s teams have been somewhat notorious for nagging muscle injuries over the years, going back to his times at AC Milan. On Wednesday, the first injury reports of training camp trickled in, with a couple of players missing due to muscle fatigue. Those players are Marco Da Graca and Paulo Dybala.

Da Graca, 19, is a striker on the U23 team, playing seven times in Serie C last year and scoring one goal. He also made his senior team debut in Juve’s Coppa Italia quarterfinal victory over SPAL. You may have recognized him as the kid Federico Chiesa flexed on at the very end of the game, taking the ball off his foot even as he was lining up his own rebound to perhaps score in the dying minutes before scoring himself.

Dybala, on the other hand, is by far the bigger name here, especially given the fact that certain portions of the fan base have decided that last year’s injury-hit campaign has instantly qualified him for the title of “fragile,” despite the fact that it was the first time in his career that he had lost so much of a season to injury, and the compressed nature of both last season and the 2019-20 restart was going to do weird things to a lot of players from an injury standpoint.

The key thing to note here is that both players are simply listed as dealing with “muscle fatigue”—in the left thigh for Dybala and the right adductor for Da Graca—which is not only minor but also to be expected at the beginning of training camp as players’ bodies ramp themselves back into the game shape. Both are going to carry out personalized training programs for a few days and might miss the friendly on Saturday, but overall this isn’t a thing to be too concerned about at this point in training.