Mikel Merino has revealed that he feared he might never play football again after his freak foot injury with Arsenal earlier this year.
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Arsenal midfielder Mikel Merino has had a very positive return from injury so far, lifting the Premier League trophy in his first game back, going on to win the World Cup over the summer, and making a good start to the new campaign for club and country.
But reflecting on his injury in an interview with The Players’ Tribune this week, Merino has admitted he wasn’t always confident that he’d be able to make this kind of comeback.
In fact, he initially believed he would miss the World Cup, and that he might not ever play professional football again.
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“The doctor said ‘six months’,” Merino recalled. “I was too shocked to even feel sad. I just did the math in my head. The World Cup was four months away.
“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.
“They told me they could drill two screws into my foot to give it support. I was like, ‘Vamos, put ’em in’.”
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As it turned out, Merino was back in training in early May, shortly after the birth of his son. He then managed to convince Arsenal boss Mikel Arteta and the club’s physios that he was fit enough to play in that final Premier League game against Crystal Palace.
“I spent all week arguing with the boss and the physios,” Merino recalled. “The plan was for me to return for the Champions League final, and even that was risky. But I had to show Luis (de la Fuente, Spain manager) that I was ready. Finally, they agreed to give me half an hour against Palace.”
The rest is history. Merino had a positive cameo in the Palace game, he made the Spain squad, he scored winners in the World Cup round-of-16 and quarter-finals, and he went on to lift the trophy.
Fortunately, there no longer looks to be any danger of that injury preventing the 30-year-old from continuing his career.
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