Federico Chiesa not called up for Juventus’ Champions League opener

As Juventus players stepped out to start training Monday afternoon, there was one video that we wanted to see from the contingent of Italian media members on hand at Continassa. It had to do with Federico Chiesa and if he was either training on his own or training with the rest of the group.

Unfortunately for us, it was Door No. 1, with individualized training on the docket.

That soon translated into Juventus revealing via their social media channels that Chiesa — who also missed out on Saturday night’s 2-1 loss to Napoli — will not be part of the traveling squad heading to Sweden for Juve’s Champions League group stage opener against Malmö. The hope was, obviously, that Chiesa being held out of the Napoli game out of precaution would work out and that he would recover from his hamstring injury fast enough to be available to Max Allegri in one way or another against Malmö. But that’s not how it actually ended up working out.

And just to complete the Wings of Fede disappointment, Federico Bernardeschi was also not called up for the trip to Sweden due to a knee injury he picked up against Napoli.

If they’re playing it safe with Chiesa (and Bernardeschi), then that’s fine, I guess. But it still sucks to see Chiesa, who has been in fantastic form for club and country to begin the 2021-22 season, not available to try and help Juventus try and get out of this early-season rut.

As much as wanting Juventus to finally do some things right on Tuesday night is a priority, a lot of the attention — at least from an injury point of view — turns to the weekend when Juventus host Milan and try to not fall 11 points off the pace all of four games into the season. Allegri didn’t exactly give a timetable as to when Chiesa might be back, so this is suddenly becoming a situation where we’re going to be playing it game-by-game — which, for our own sanity, isn’t going to be very helpful if it extends any further than the weekend.