Juventus returned to the Continassa on Tuesday morning to begin preparations for Sunday evening’s away fixture against Sassuolo — and the training session update provides only qualified encouragement on the three players Spalletti most urgently needs back in the fold.
The Three Still Working Apart
McKennie, Pape Matar Sarr, and Andrea Cambiaso all completed individual programmes separate from the main group on Tuesday morning — the same status each of them held in the final days before the Milan match. Their recovery from muscular fatigue, a physical carry-over from Tottenham, and an ankle sprain respectively is ongoing but has not yet progressed to the point where full group training is possible.
The hope within the club is that all three could be available at least for the bench at Sassuolo — a degree of participation that would give Spalletti some flexibility in the closing stages of a match that could prove extremely tight given the available resources. Whether that hope is realised will depend on how the next three training sessions — Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday — develop. No positive signal has emerged today. But no negative one has been confirmed either.
Owusu: Confirmed in the Squad
The one piece of unambiguously confirmed news from Tuesday’s update is that Augusto Owusu will be included in the squad for Sunday’s fixture at the Mapei Stadium. The Next Gen midfielder — born in 2005, named after Edgar Davids by a father who admired the former Juventus and Dutch international, an error in the registry giving him the slightly adjusted spelling of “Sedorf” — has been called up by Spalletti in direct response to the midfield emergency created by Locatelli’s surgery and Thuram’s four-month absence. He becomes one of the very few pieces of genuinely available midfield resource that the manager can deploy from the start or during the match.
The Full Picture Heading Into the Week
The confirmed absentees for Sassuolo remain: Yıldız, Thuram, Locatelli, Ekhator, Boga, and Cabal. McKennie, Sarr, and Cambiaso are doubts — classified as working on individual programmes and not yet cleared for full group training. Owusu is confirmed as a squad member. The nine injured players Spalletti referenced before the Milan match have reduced slightly — but the midfield, on the available evidence, remains the most precariously thin it has been since the summer’s extensive reconstruction was completed.
