Steven Gerrard has sadly confirmed Nikola Katic’s recovery is unfortunately not going to be imminent in the next few weeks, but may in fact have suffered a setback as the manager revealed the big man has no timescale on his restoration to the squad, and it will be in the hands of the Gods.

Revealing this kind of injury can be anywhere between 7-12 months, Gerrard put a real downer on the chances of us seeing Katic before Spring, having suffered the troubling ACLI in July this year.

By expanding the recovery window to potentially as long as next summer, Gerrard has massively reduced pressure on Katic, but equally revealed that it was necessary to do so.

Katic is lugging a tonne of iron in the gym, but we simply don’t know where his recovery is now. It had been believed that he was on track for an early January return, as we reported a week ago, but Gerrard’s words illustrate that it’s just not going to happen.

Indeed, Katic will return to Croatia for Christmas to be with his family, and fans have been warned to massively reduce hope and expectation for him being back anything like next month.

As we say, this may hint at a setback, but then a lot of recoveries of these kinds of injuries can occasionally see the odd step back the way, because they’re such messy and destructive injuries and can take a tonne of work and blips to fully get back to fitness.

And indeed, very often players are never quite the same again – Radamel Falcao was easily the world’s best striker many years ago, but got a bad ACLI at Monaco and was never the same player again.

Katic may well be the same.

But whenever he gets back, we do of course wish him well.