“He's a crystal player.” This is how clear and forceful a member of the club's medical services responds when asked about the umpteenth injury to Ousmane Dembélé. While it is true that this time the injury is of a minor route -an elongation in the biceps femoris of the right leg that will have, as we have advanced in AS, a minimum time of two weeks off the pitch-, This new setback has awakened the ghosts that seemed buried this season.
And it is that Dembélé, born in Vernon 23 years ago, adds with this new injury a total of Nine muscle mishaps since he signed for Barcelona in the summer of 2017, with the aggravation that most have focused on the hamstrings and more specifically on the biceps femoris. This sad story began on September 16, 2017when Ousmane had only been at the club for two months. A frustrated attempt to keep the ball out of bounds prompted him to hit his heel with his left leg, with a clearly onerous result: a ruptured hamstring tendon in his left leg. Dembélé had to undergo surgery in Finland, returning to play four months later.
From here, the story becomes almost a horror tale, where a player tries to get out of the pit of injuries, but falls irretrievably again and again. Nor did her messy life, her lack of professionalism and her bad eating habits help. The club tried to remedy it, succeeding in part, since one of the first decisions of the French striker was to fire the chef that the club gave him. However, little by little, Dembélé came to his senses, leaving behind a series of dire attitudes for his career.
But injuries have always accompanied him, more or less seriously. Injuries and relapses, because in this regard, The medical services have not been very fortunate either, with irregular and incomplete recoveries, which forced the player to turn a deaf ear to the advice of the club's doctors and physios, and go to Doha to seek a solution to his injuries.
The most serious case in this sense was lived last season. After injuring himself on November 27, 2019 during a Champions League match against his former team, Borussia Dortmund, at the Camp Nou, diagnosing him with a ruptured hamstring in his right leg. When he was about to reappear and during a training session, the player relapsed again, but this way with a major injury, as the proximal biceps femoris tendon ruptured and he needed to undergo surgery again, needing seven months to return to the field. of game, before the despair of a Quique Setién, who had come to assure that tears fell every time he saw the Frenchman in training.
With the arrival of Ronald Koeman and the special supervision of physical trainer Albert Roca it seemed that the French forward had found the philosopher's stone. He added minutes and games, had continuity, his game began to emerge and he looked happy on the field – he even put on the captain's armband for a few minutes in the Champions League game against Ferencvaros – but tEverything has been diluted like a simple mirage, with the hard slap of a new injury, which once again feeds all the doubts about the player.
Now Dembélé returns to visit the facilities that he knows best in the Ciutat Esportiva: the infirmary and the stretchers for the physiotherapy sessions. A situation that leaves his renewal in suspense and that could raise more than one question about his future for the new president who comes out of the January 24 elections.