There’s not a lot of good stuff to come out of an international break, unless you count “not getting injured” as one of the good things. Which it is! And so, it gives me great pleasure to announce that there are two injured players who are soon to be not-injured. According to Alasdair Gold in Football.London, Romanian central defender Radu Dragusin has returned to training, and new defensive signing Kota Takai should be back on the grass sometime this week.
Not that we should expect to see Radu in a match anytime soon — he’s been out with a long term injury for the past nine months, and any time you spend that much time away from any sport it’s going to take a while to get back up to speed. The other bit of good news is that there’s a senior defender who can slide-tackle Radu quickly back into focus: Cuti Romero. Tottenham’s club captain picked up a second yellow card in three matches in Argentina’s 3-0 win over Venezuela last Thursday, and as a result he’s suspended for the second match at Ecuador. Since he can’t play, he’s apparently returned to London and is back training with Thomas Frank.
We haven’t seen Takai at all — he reported to Spurs with plantar fasciitis, a foot condition that is both painful and pernicious. It can take a while to heal, so it’s nice to see that he’ll likely be at least on the grass doing some training sometime this week.
I don’t have real expectations that Takai will feature in many matches this season. In fact, if he weren’t injured he might have gone out on loan this season somewhere, maybe the Championship, to get acclimated to England. As it is he’s probably the break-glass-in-case-of-emergency defender at the moment, and that’s fine.
Spurs’ next match is the London Derby at West Ham this coming Saturday; they host Villarreal in their first Champions League match on Thurs. September 16.