Celtic’s Filip Benkovic had his injury situation cleared up by Brendan Rodgers last night, and the news could’ve been better.
On Celtic’s official Twitter page, Rodgers confirmed that Benkovic would be out for the next four-five weeks initially. From there on the club will assess his situation afterwards.
This means that the Leicester City-owned defender could be out until just after the beginning of March at the earliest. But it sounds like it could be a lot longer than four-five weeks too given Rodgers’ assessment.
Regardless, it doesn’t seem as though he’ll be out for the entire campaign. That appears to be a fear we can now discard given that the campaign ends in May. If necessary, Benkovic could still have a part to play.
But, the big question is, would it even be worth it?
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Benkovic has been a huge success this season. He’s turned into Celtic’s best defender within the first six months of his time in Glasgow. He’s even managed to make Dedryck Boyata look inferior alongside him, and that takes some real quality.
It would be risky business
But if the centre-back is going to be out for such a prolonged period of time, bringing him back could be risky.
Celtic will be looking to build up a new centre-back partnership in the mean-time. The combination of Jozo Simunovic and Kristoffer Ajer will clearly be enough for the likes of St Johnstone, Hamilton, and St Mirren. But for bigger games away to the likes of Hearts, Aberdeen, and Rangers, we may need something else.
But it’s also likely that by the time Benkovic returns, a new partnership will have been in place for a couple or a few months. Breaking that up to accommodate the return of the Croatian could be risky business.
It’s a well-known aspect of football management not to consistently tweak your defence. Given the severity of the Benkovic injury, Celtic could be taking a big gamble if they just threw him back in for the final 10 or so games of the campaign.
It would make more sense for the Hoops to go out and buy another centre-back today. Using Benkovic after such a lengthy spell out may not be as seamless as many would hope.