Last February, I had to watch the most depressing PowerPoint of my life.
I was in an office at the training ground, wearing a protective boot. The club doctor and the chief physio were going slide by slide.
“As this picture shows, it’s a stress fracture in your right foot….”
Click.
“This scan shows that it’s pretty bad.”
Click.
The title race was on. The World Cup was close. My wife was pregnant.
“And this slide shows….”
I was thinking, OK, I get it. How long?
The doctor said, “Six months.”
I was too shocked to even feel sad. I just did the math in my head. The World Cup was four months away.
I said, “Are you sure???”
He said, “Mikel, I’m sorry. It’s impossible.”
The situation was even worse, because the specialist who did the scan had never seen a stress fracture in that part of the foot. He’d been doing this for 30 years. He had called five of the best specialists in the world, and none of them had seen it either. Nobody knew how my foot would recover, or if it would recover at all. Part of me feared that I would never play football again.
I drove home in silence.
