Report: Gonzalo Veron returning to New York Red Bulls on April 10

Per Kristian Dyer’s report for MSG, New York Red Bulls head coach Jesse Marsch has advised absentee Argentine Gonzalo Veron will be returning to the club on Monday, April 10.

Veron was last seen on the field for RBNY on March 2 against the Vancouver Whitecaps in CONCACAF Champions League, when he was subbed out inside the first 10 minutes with the injury that has kept him sidelined ever since.

Over the course of the following weeks, he has been the subject of modestly optimistic updates from the club, with the most specific and positive arriving in the build-up to the Red Bulls’ game against Houston Dynamo on April 1. Though Veron was not proposed as a candidate to play in that match, he was penciled in for a mid-week appearance with NYRB II on April 5, with Marsch stating he had hope the player might be in contention to play against Orlando on April 9.

Didn’t happen. When the team returned to training after the Houston game, Marsch’s update on Veron’s status took an unexpected detour from the usual he’ll-be-back-soon report to “he actually went down to Argentina today”. “Today” was Tuesday, April 4. In the same chat with reporters at the training ground that day, Marsch offered a blunt assessment of Veron’s status: “No progress?” he was asked; “Not really,” came the reply.

After RBNY training on Friday, April 7, Marsch was similarly downbeat about Veron’s recovery. As reported by Kristian Dyer for MSG, the RBNY head coach told reporters, “There’s nothing new, no revelation in terms of where he’s at.”

But Veron is returning from a brief consultation with a specialist in Argentina (the same specialist who Montreal Impact brought in to treat Ignacio Piatti, said Marsch), so he is presumably coming back to the club with fresh advice for how to address the injury that has confounded the Red Bulls’ medical team for the last month.

Marsch’s apparent lack of anything positive or substantive to say about the situation might be a fair reflection of an issue that obviously long ago stopped making sense to RBNY (the injury has consistently been characterized as relatively minor and unlikely to require lengthy treatment), or it might simply be a prudent reaction to the fact that the last time the Red Bulls head coach detailed a recovery schedule, he was left in the uncomfortable position of having to explain that Veron was en route to Argentina instead of the training ground.

Whatever you say, say nothing, Jesse: we get it. Veron’s injury will hopefully resolve itself soon. But it has apparently defied all effort by RBNY to define it and cure it to date. We know where Veron is, we know when he’ll be back at the club. That’s probably all it is fair to expect to know, because it sounds like it’s more or less all the Red Bulls know for now.

On a brighter note (in the sense that Veron’s situation is not bright at all), Marsch offered more concrete plans for the team’s other more-injured-than-expected attacker, Mike Grella:

All indications right now are that Mike’s moving in the right direction. He’s still probably about two weeks before he’s getting on the field.

Assuming that means “two weeks before he’s back in training”, perhaps Grella has a shot at playing for the first team again by the end of April.