Vanja Marinkovic: Back by Late October or November

Vanja Marinkovic sits on the sidelines. The crutches are long gone, but the court is still waiting. Partizan’s captain hasn’t stepped onto the floor since January, yet by his own account, this is the first time since the injury that he feels completely calm talking about it.

Vanja Marinkovic (29) spoke at length for the first time about the injury that cost him nearly an entire season, the months of recovery, and something he had never discussed publicly before: the stress that, at one point, pushed him to the edge of leaving the club he had given his career to. He said this in a wide-ranging interview for Sportske.net.

He tore his Achilles tendon in January, during a game against Israel’s Hapoel Tel Aviv. He had surgery in the Finnish city of Turku and spent most of his recovery there, far from Belgrade and the arena where he’s used to wearing the captain’s armband.

Nine months later, his return timeline is specific, though cautious.

“I feel great, really. The estimate is that I’ll be back sometime in late October or early November,” Marinkovic said in the interview for Sportske.net.

Before he gets the green light, new tests await him, again in Finland, where he had the surgery. Only after those will additional conditioning work follow, a phase he says matters just as much as the tendon’s recovery itself. Marinkovic also cautions that the timeline isn’t a guarantee but a rough plan that depends on the test results.

A lesser-known part of the story is how much last season cost him off the court. At one point, he admits, he seriously considered leaving Partizan, but he didn’t want to say goodbye to the club as an injured player running from its hardest moment.

“I wouldn’t wish the stress I went through last year on anyone,” Partizan’s captain told Sportske.net.

He adds that he wouldn’t wish that experience on any kid coming to play for the club, any foreign player, anyone, no matter how ready they think they are for the pressure that comes with wearing the captain’s armband at a big club.

Despite the injury, he extended his contract with Partizan over the summer, even though he was injured at the time and, by his own admission, would have had an easier path to leaving under different circumstances. He explains it as a choice not to walk away while the club was going through a difficult season, but to wait for a moment when both he and the team would be in a better position for a parting of ways, if that ever happens.

The hardest moment, he admits, came one Saturday, when emotions briefly overtook everything else.

“I wanted to set myself on fire,” Marinkovic said, describing the state he was in while deciding whether to stay or leave the club in the middle of a season he himself calls catastrophic.

Today he talks about it in a different tone. The surgery, he says, went as well as it possibly could, and with it came a peace of mind he had been missing for months.

“My recovery is nearly complete, I had an excellent operation, the best possible one, and I’m completely at peace,” Marinkovic told Sportske.net.

While he waits to return, the captain is watching the new team from the front row, literally from the bench. Partizan brought in a string of new signings over the summer, and Marinkovic says they seem to have fit in faster than he expected, largely because the players who joined are quality additions who asked around about what awaited them at the club after everything that happened last season. He isn’t expecting fireworks from the first game, since that, he says, wouldn’t be realistic, but he believes a solid start and a firm foundation will bring everything else with it.

Partizan is entering the season without its captain on the court, but with a clear timeline for his return. By late October or early November, it will become clear how ready Marinkovic is, after everything, to put the captain’s armband back where it belongs.