Angel Di Maria to miss at least 10 days with groin injury

As Angel Di Maria pulled up and started to show the signs of some sort of groin injury, you know damn well that sinking feeling started to develop in your stomach rather quickly. The handful of shots of Di Maria sitting on the bench revealed a guy who maybe didn’t have the kind of look on his face you might imagine one would as his team was in the final stages of a 3-0 season-opening win.

Now we know why Di Maria was a little reserved in his enthusiasm.

Following a visit to everybody’s favorite place in Turin, J Medical, Juventus announced Tuesday that Di Maria will miss the next 10 days (at least) due to the groin injury that forced him to come off midway through the second half in the season-opening win over Sassuolo. That means Di Maria is certainly out for next Monday’s trip to Sampdoria and could very well cast a doubt for his status for Juve’s early-season showdown with Roma if things don’t progress all that well following the initial 10-day timetable Juve’s put out there.

The update, courtesy of Juventus’ official website:

Angel Di Maria underwent radiological examinations this morning at J | Medical which revealed a low-grade lesion of the adductor longus muscle of the left thigh. The extent of the injury will re-evaluated in 10 days.

During his post-match press conference, Max Allegri said that he was not all that worried about Di Maria’s injury. At that point, we didn’t totally know the severity of the injury — which thankfully isn’t all that serious at all — but Allegri did reveal the little nugget of information that Di Maria had been dealing with the same kind of issue in training a week or so ago. Allegri also said, in hindsight, that he should have maybe taken Di Maria off sooner, but watching the Argentine winger enjoying himself out there influenced his decision to keep him on despite Juve being in control score-wise.

But hindsight is hindsight. And Juve must now potentially deal with Di Maria being out for the next week and a half at the very least.

With Filip Kostic’s arrival, the logic seems to point toward the 29-year-old Serb and Juan Cuadrado occupying the bulk of the playing time on the wings no matter if Allegri goes with a 4-4-2 or a 4-3-3. Knowing that Di Maria was the one playing off Dusan Vlahovic in the initial 4-4-2 that Allegri rolled out against Sassuolo on Monday night, going with a 4-3-3 seems like the best solution in Di Maria’s absence.

But hopefully that’s the kind of thing we don’t have to consider for too many games going forward here. The good thing is that the schedule the first couple of weeks of this unique-as-hell season isn’t too congested, so Juventus has more than a few days between the Sampdoria and Roma fixtures before things get nuts.