Schalke 04: Fresh injury concerns fast forward the future

Schalke 04’s fortunes continue to go from bad to worse, as Suat Serdar will now be forced to miss the rest of the season. Fast forward the future, I guess.

Just when you thought that the buffoonery at Schalke 04 couldn’t get any worse, after a -18 goal differential since the new year, things did just that. They got worse. Now, instead of going into Fortuna Dusseldorf with a fresh helping of confidence and health, they’ll instead be looking like a completely different team, with Amine Harit and Suat Serdar both missing from action.

Serdar suffered a new knee injury, as he tore a ligament in the gross and debilitating loss to FC Augsburg. Serdar, our leading goal scorer, now joins Amine Harit, the leading goal contributor, on the injured list.

That’s seventeen goal contributions—over half of Die Knappe’s overall production—that cannot take the pitch. This coming at a time when goals are our primary concern. We’ve scored just four goals since the start of the new year and just one in our past eight matches.

Schalke’s injury woes bring new players to the forefront

David Wagner already had enough troubles as is. He can’t manage to figure out how to put a team out there that won’t get slaughtered by any given opponent. And a big reason why is because they can’t sustain attacking play.

With rumors tying Suat Serdar and Amine Harit to exits either now or in the future, this little uninvited period of injury nightmares essentially fast-forwards the future of this midfield. A future with similar midfield threats that just… aren’t as experienced or established.

Alessandro Schopf will likely keep his place, but filling around him we will almost certainly have to see either Nassim Boujellab or Levent Mercan take the place of Serdar, maybe even both.

This sucks. Badly. There’s no hiding from that. But digging for the silver lining (we’re doing a lot of digging these days), it means that our two stellar midfield goal threats from the youth ranks get their chance to prove that we can live on after Suat Serdar. Of course, we know we can, but seeing it in the present would lighten the load more than a little.

It’s hard to look forward to Schalke matches these days, even more with our goal-scoring threats disappearing left and right, or not even existing in the first place. But the youth movement is necessary anyway, so there’s still some buried excitement here.