Peñarol’s versions about the injury of Orlando Méndez who was exchanged for Penka Aguirre

Méndez, who arrived in Peñarol in March as a replacement for the American Vander Blue, played the first two finals with a pain in the shoulder which had him far from his best performance.

In the first final, last Saturday, he scored five points in 31 minutes and on Monday, in the second, he was only 17 minutes on the court with two goals.

As soon as that game ended, coach Pablo López, interviewed by VTV, stated that on Tuesday, Peñarol was going to carry out a Zoom with the player’s doctor to analyze the steps to follow to recover his shoulder, but ruled out the possibility of ordering a replacement.

Pablo López, worried about an unexpected change

From the quarterfinals, only in cases of injury that prevent a player from training for 15 days, a player can be replaced by another as long as he is evaluated by a medical board that diagnoses the injury.

It was what Aguada did in the semifinal series against Peñarol to change Tyreek Duren.

Peñarol requested it for this Wednesday in the morning hours Méndez was found to have a hamstring tear.

In the Puro Básquetbol program, the physical trainer Tabaré Papariello expressed that the player ended up injured after the second game: “A little we were surprised by the tear. He is a veteran player accumulated many minutes in playoffs, in Mexico he did not used to play more than 18 or 20 minutes and here, beyond the minutes, we loaded him with a leading role so that he generated at the attacking level. The shoulder pain was what worried us the most, but when the match finished he told me he had a sore hamstring, but the pain in his shoulder was so great that it was what worried him. He even tried to continue playing with that discomfort in the hindquarters, which is a muscle that can be compensated with another muscle of the posterior chain, so at the time of the game, when it was hot, he did not feel it with the adrenaline and testosterone up. The next day, when he got cold, limped out of the hotel to get the MRI and the first thing he said, because he knows himself, was that ‘surely he has a tear'”.

Consulted by an informed version in the aforementioned media outlet on whether in the last training session at the Antel Arena prior to the first game, played on Friday of last week, he stepped on a sub-21 player and that caused him discomfort that made him run differently, Papariello said: “Sure, he is a player who knows himself a lot, but who also has a lot of courage, a lot of courage to play. Many times he hid his pain. The days after the game that we did the recovery, he told me that he felt good and that he was going to help the team in any way he could. The had that episode and sometimes a small contracture can cause that entire muscle chain to start working in the wrong way and in the long run it starts to drag a pain that in the first explosive impulse of the first quarter it may have been aggravated. And well, also the emotional stress of the finals and in the context of a volume of minutes that was dragging”.

However, Orlando Méndez himself said that he felt muscle pain four minutes into the second game against Biguá: “The pain in the shoulder took away the pain in the leg. Four minutes into the second half of the second game, in a sprint I did in transition I felt it, a pull. I had to defend (Donald) Sims in some transitions, and it was very painful, the shoulder was also in pain.

In the same medium, López declared: “We had the issue of the shoulder that conditioned him a lot and the other day with the pain in his shoulder he did not feel the fibrillar rupture and continued playing, and we had to replace.

The truth is that regardless of when the injury occurred, it was verified by a medical board and Peñarol enabled the replacement.

Nicolás “Penka” Aguirre embarked at 5:00 am and arrived in Uruguay in the morning to make himself available to López in the morning training session that took place at Palacio Peñarol.

Aguirre He is 34 years old, he is a point guard and can play as a point guard. He was born in Santiago del Estero, he played in Quilmes, Boca Juniors, La Unión de Formosa, Quimsa, Zionista, San Lorenzo and Regatas de Corrientes where 20 days ago he closed his season playing playoffs.

He left five times league champion with San Lorenzo and one with Quimsa. He has integrated the Argentine national team and it was the MVP of the League 2014-2015.