Galatasaray worry over Osimhen’s injury

Galatasaray Technical Director Okan Buruk bemoans the injury to Victor Osimhen as the striker races to be fit for club’s subsequent matches.

The 25-year-old clashed with Kasimpasa goalkeeper Andreas Gianniotis shortly after the restart of the second half of Saturday’s Turkish Super Lig fixture and signalled to be substituted, raising concerns about his availability for both club and country in the coming days.

Osimhen had put Galatasaray 2-0 up in the first 28 minutes before being pulled and watched the rest of the proceeding from the bench as the team squandered their healthy lead to draw 3-3.

The Napoli loanee opened the scoring on 20 minutes, his dock breaker, delivering a simple finish from an Abdulkerim Bardakcı cross before doubling his lead and completing his brace in a spectacular eight minutes later.

Speaking with the club’s media team, Buruk laments the injury to the player who has hit the ground running at the Istanbul giants.

He said, “One of our biggest fears was injury. This happened in Osimhen. I said it last week. We play on Wednesday, and our next match is on Thursday. Someone assigns us a match for Saturday. The match planning means this. Let’s squeeze you; let’s injure you. Go to the next European match without missing. This is what they are saying directly. The rotations we made were due to the fear of injury. We played four matches in a row. Three days later, another match was added. We started well. We got to 3-0. If we had gone into the first half without conceding a goal, it might have been different for us. Our start to the second half was not good.”

“Osimhen and Sallai were injured. The players who entered were not very effective except for Kaan. They did not give us what we wanted. We entered players who could affect the game. Afterwards, we could neither go to the opponent’s goal nor keep the ball. Although we did not give the opponent very clear positions, our defence started to run back from time to time. We took the game from the line we wanted on our own.”

While the striker allayed injury fears after the match, his possible absence from the crucial double-header against Libya on October 11 and 15 could cause a huge setback in Nigeria’s qualification.

Osimhen has scored 22 goals in 35 appearances for Nigeria, and the interim coach, Austin Eguavoen, hopes to have him lead the line against the North Africans.