After an ankle injury derailed his chances of making an impact at the beginning of the season, Mateo Joseph is working to regain his sharpness.
He has yet to play for the senior team this season or even the under-21s, but Farke has used him twice on the bench, against Watford and Sheffield Wednesday at home.
Farke admits he was impressed with young striker in pre-season and can’t wait to work with him when he is back to full fitness.
“So I was pretty impressed and pretty happy with him in pre-season. He had great games, also behind closed doors in the friendly against Barnsley, he was excellent but also all the other friendlies.
“Sadly he had this long term injury and as a young player who is just on the way into the first team football it’s never easy if you miss such a big part and you are out for more or less two months and you then need a little bit longer to be back in shape.
“Obviously for him it’s also not that easy because you can’t give just game time away in order to bring him back from this confidence level and in this rhythm. But on the training pitch he looks really sharp and we are also thinking perhaps of giving him some minutes perhaps also whenever possible in the under-21s to give him a bit of feeling for the positioning, but also the feeling for a normal game.
“But, once he is capable to impress that is also a chance to be selected for the traveling squad like he was for example for the last game and we obviously we also had a few injury concerns in the last game with Willy Gnonto and also Patrick was not one hundred per cent available.
“For that, we are happy that Mateo was available and I’m quite sure that in the mid and long term future of this club he will play a pretty pretty important role amd I’m pleased with him.” – said Farke.