Ex-Arsenal star cazorla opens up on injury that nearly ended his career

Wenger has a chat with Carzola and Arteta, Photo Courtesy

Former Arsenal midfielder Santi Carzola has finally opened up on the horrific injury he suffered while at Arsenal noting that he lost a huge chunk of the tendon to a bacteria-eating infection that ended his Arsenal career.

Carzola played the last competitive match for Arsenal back in 2016 against Ludogorets and spent 636 days on the sidelines after suffering bacterial infection after undergoing surgery in hospital. The Spaniard was then in and out of the hospital and had to go through a number of surgeries to rectify his infected Achilles tendon that included a skin grafting technique.

In an interview with The Guardian Carzola spoke on the extent of the injury, “I picked it up in the operating theatre and then there was the fact that the wound was open. I’d work on the bike and a couple of stitches would come out. Because it was an open wound, bacteria can enter, so another bug gets in. At night, a yellow liquid would come out.”

The Villareal midfielder added that the surgery got infected every time he went to cover it up, “Every time they sewed me up, it split again; more liquid. They did a skin graft but they didn’t see what was inside – the bacteria eating away, eating away. They never found out which bacteria it was. They didn’t know how much of the tendon the infection had eaten.”

The 33-year-old noted that should the bacteria had infected the tendon a little further it would have been worse, “[The surgeon] said: ‘I’m going to have to open you up until I find the tendon.’ They told me they’d have to open, open, open, open and when they did, they saw I had lost 10cm. I’d been lucky, they said, it could have been more. When he had to rebuild the tendon, he realized how bad a condition the bone was in. He could put his finger in it. It was like Plasticine. That’s even more dangerous.”

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