A major Dutch legend who lived through a career-ending injury, revealed details about the hell he went through on his auto-biography.
There are many Dutch players who can be considered legends throughout history, but only one of them had a career-ending injury. We are talking about the incredible Marco van Basten. He is still considered one of the best strikers in football history despite suffering a nasty ankle injury that forced him to retire before the age of 30. During his struggle with this terrible issue, he never revealed details of what he experienced as vividly as today.
“It was midnight in 1994 and I remembered having to crawl from my bed to the bathroom,” Van Basten detailed in his book ‘Enough. My life. My truth’ via Marca. “I counted the seconds it took to complete that crawl to simply distract myself from the pain.
“The threshold of the door was the worst area because I had to get through them without knocking my ankle, even the slightest touch made me bite my lips in order not to scream, I never did it faster than 120 seconds.”
“Everything fell apart because there was a lot of pain and other problems,” he admitted in a further interview with The Guardian.
“I have to say that in the last five years of my career, I was limping after all the operations.”I couldn’t do anything without pain and the doctors told me they couldn’t help me, I became afraid.”
Van Basten’s biggest revelation about his injury.
But far from the injury itself, lies the biggest revelation of this hell Van Basten went through. He just revealed that the first major issue he had was in 1986, which was before he played for AC Milan. To those who don’t remember, Marco van Basten’s most important years were between 1987 and 1991.
That the time period in which he won three consecutive Ballon d’Or trophies, two European Cups, and the European Championship with the Netherlands in 1988. So he’s telling us that he did all that while suffering an injury that would eventually end his career? That’s just incredible.
“My first injury was in the December of 1986 and I never recovered,” he confirmed. “Johan Cruyff spoke with the doctor and told him that I had a problem, but that it wouldn’t get worse so I could play.
“I already had the feeling that something wasn’t right, but I made a deal with him in which he told me I could skip training and not play in some competitions, but that I would have to be available for European matches no matter what.”
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