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Barcelona’s talisman Lionel Messi has been ruled out for a period of 7-8 weeks after having suffered a tear in his medial collateral ligament 3 minutes into the Catalans’ home game against Las Palmas. He was substituted 10 minutes into the game and will now miss a sequence of pretty important matches for the reigning La Liga champions.
The diminutive Argentinean went down after hurting himself while shooting under pressure from Las Palmas defender Pedro Bigas Rigo. He then tried to come back onto the field and fight the injury off, but couldn’t continue and was replaced by Munir El Haddadi. This was the fastest substitution for Messi in his professional career.
He was immediately taken to a nearby hospital as the Catalan club clearly didn’t want to take any risks with what looked like a serious injury and scans have now confirmed what the club would have been fearing. La Liga’s top goalscorer has torn his medial collateral ligament and will be absent for a period of about 2 months.
The injury comes at a bad time for Barcelona, with the club having suffered a heavy 4-1 loss in their previous La Liga game at the hands of Celta Vigo. Though the team were able to pull through and win today’s match against Las Palmas, they have a tough schedule going forward and will surely miss Messi.
Messi should be back for El Clasico
Their next few matches will see them take on Bayer Leverkusen in the Champions League, Sevilla and Rayo Vallecano in the league before a match against BATE Borisov in the UEFA Champions League. Following that, there is a Copa del Rey match, followed by a league match against Getafe and the return Champions League match against BATE. The final game that he is expected to miss is Barcelona’s match against Villareal which happens on the 8th of November.
The next match for them is the El Clasico, which is on the 22nd of November. Although it looks at this moment that Messi will be back for that match, Luis Enrique and the Barcelona team will be hoping that there are no setbacks during the Argentine’s recovery process and that he is match-fit and available for the game against their arch-rivals Real.
When asked about the injury to Messi, coach Luis Enrique said, "Always sad when a player gets injured, and even more when it's Messi. Injuries are part of football, we'll get through this. We won't change our style of playing with Messi injured. He decides a lot of games, but the team has to step up now."
Here’s the video of the moment when he suffered his injury:
Later, he emerged out of the hospital after undergoing scans, limping visibly.
