Gareth Southgate is keeping his fingers crossed that Julio Arca does not have to have an operation on his injured ankle."Julio's progressing well," the Boro boss told the Echo. "He's over in Argentina and he's been doing quite a bit of running.
"He's hoping to get back into some sort of football training before the end of the week and, provided he's able to do that, he'll be on the way to a full recovery.
"We can't rule out an operation entirely at this stage because, until he's been involved in a couple of training sessions, we won't know 100 per cent whether things have progressed as we'd hoped.
"But we're certainly hopeful that he can avoid the threat of any surgery.
"That was why we sent him out there, and all the signs so far are that things have gone well."
