Scaloni breaks silence before World Cup: injuries, squad, Honduras XI | OneFootball

The Argentina National Team left Kansas this Friday and arrived in Texas to face Honduras in Saturday’s friendly. Beyond the open training session that will take place in the new city, the spotlight today will be on Lionel Scaloni, who will give his first press conference since the start of the training camp ahead of the World Cup at 7:15 p.m. (Argentina time).

On the eve of the first warm-up match and 11 days before the national team’s debut against Algeria, the coach is expected to address several of the issues currently drawing the most attention around Argentina: the physical condition of players dealing with knocks, the possibility of any changes to the squad list, and the team he has in mind for Saturday, among others. The coach’s remarks will come 45 minutes before training begins, which will be open to the press and broadcast by TyC Sports.

The main question mark concerns the injured players. During the first training sessions in the United States, the coaching staff chose to manage workloads and have several players do separate work, a situation that inevitably raised concerns less than two weeks before the World Cup opener.

On Wednesday, the big surprise was Julián Álvarez’s absence from on-field work. The forward had been medically cleared just one day earlier, but when he took part in the full training session, the ankle where he had been carrying a sprain became inflamed again. Although the national team has played down concerns and believes he will make it to the World Cup without any issues, his situation will surely be one of the topics Scaloni goes into in greater depth.

In addition, the AFA reported this Thursday that Nicolás Paz, Gonzalo Montiel, Nahuel Molina, Leandro Paredes, and Lionel Messi continue to recover well from the various physical issues they have been dealing with and are doing so within the timeframes expected by the medical staff. Emiliano Martínez is also on that list. The World Cup-winning goalkeeper still has his right hand immobilized due to the fracture to his ring finger that he suffered weeks ago, although he will make it to the opener without any problems.

Could there be changes to the World Cup squad? That possibility will be one of the main focuses of Scaloni’s comments. The truth is that although the coaching staff has projected calm and insists that all the players will be fit for the World Cup, the experience of Qatar forces them to remain cautious.

Just days before that tournament, Scaloni had to make last-minute changes because of physical problems, and several players who had remained on a kind of “reserve list” ended up being called up. That is why the coach has already taken precautionary measures and notified four players to stay alert in case of a hypothetical emergency call-up to the World Cup if there are withdrawals: Santiago Beltrán, Nicolás Capaldo, Máximo Perrone, and Emiliano Buendía.

For now, there are no concrete signs of imminent changes, but the press conference will provide first-hand insight into the situation of each of the players currently training with controlled workloads.

This article was translated into English by Artificial Intelligence. You can read the original version in 🇪🇸 here.