Paul Pogba returns to partial training in latest step on road to Juve comeback

Tuesday saw Juventus players go through a pair of training sessions as preparations for Friday night’s showdown with Napoli kicked into gear. But there was one player, in particular, at training that had to be pretty dang relived to be there.

Juventus midfielder Paul Pogba took the latest step in his return from knee surgery by returning to partial training with the group. While Pogba’s timetable has continued to be pushed back, this is not only a big deal for the simple fact that he’s now running and cutting and doing football activities again, but also because we can hopefully see his knee respond well to the activity and then prevent what happened the last time he tried to give things a go on the training fields of Continassa.

You can watch Pogba’s handful of appearances in Juve’s video of Tuesday morning’s training session out of the field at Continassa below:

Pogba’s return to partial training comes after Goal Italia’s Romeo Agresti reported late Monday night that both Pogba and injured striker Dusan Vlahovic are both on the cusp of increasing their rehabilitation workload and returning to the training field. Agresti’s report also stated that both Pogba and Vlahovic will likely return to partial training this week.

We got Pogba, so there’s that.

We’re still waiting on Vlahovic, so there’s also that.

It’s been a long time coming for Pogba, who underwent knee surgery in early September after trying to avoid surgery on his partially torn meniscus that he picked up in training after Juventus’ Las Vegas friendly in July. The conservative therapy that Pogba tried to go about things right out of the gate only saw him need to get knee surgery and subsequently miss the World Cup and push his official return appearance at Juventus back even further.

We’re still waiting on that first start back. Maybe, like Vlahovic, it comes before the end of January arrives. Maybe it’s in February. At least Pogba is back in partial training and now a few steps away from making said official return — which is more than we could say during the World Cup break.