BARCELONA: Barcelona coach Tito Vilanova’s cancer surgery yesterday went “very well”, his captain Carles Puyol said, after an unexpected relapse shocked the Spanish league leaders.
Vilanova, 44, has led Barcelona to their best league start ever but the club said he will be in hospital for four days and then need up to six weeks of chemotherapy and radiotherapy.
“The first message I have received is that the operation has gone very well,” Puyol told a news conference after surgeons operated on Vilanova yesterday, just over a year after he underwent a similar operation on his salivary gland.
“It is very tough news, a very hard blow,” Puyol said.
Sports media quoted Vilanova as assuring players “I will be back soon,” the evening before his surgery, which media said was at Barcelona’s Vall d’Hebron hospital, where there is a specialist oncology unit.
Surgery on Barcelona coach Tito Vilanova’s saliva glands went to plan on Thursday, the La Liga club said, as assistant Jordi Roura oversaw his first training session since taking charge on a temporary basis.
“We will have to try to go on as normally as possible but there will not be total normality because Tito is the coach and now for a few weeks he will not be there,” the club’s president Sandro Rosell said late on Wednesday.
“Tito is very strong and we are convinced he will come back to us soon,” he said. AGENCIES
