Knee injuries are taking on enormous importance at a time of global football. Just when the players were complaining about too many games, two figures fell victim to medical problems that will leave them sidelined for a long time.
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One of the great spokespersons, who even threatened a strike, the Spanish Rodrigo Hernández, Rodri, from Manchester City, suffered a rupture of the anterior cruciate ligament in his right knee. And the German Marc-André ter Stegen forced FC Barcelona to go out and look for a goalkeeper: he broke the patellar tendon in his right knee.
They are more common injuries than it seems and generate long disabilities (see graph). Why do they occur? “It is difficult to determine a single cause of a type of injury, as well as ligamentous, muscular, bone and any type of tissue injuries. “There is no single cause,” explained Rafael Montaña, doctor of the Santa Fe professional team.
“The causes of these injuries are multifactorial: the calendar can affect the workload of the games, but there are other causes that may be responsible for an injury occurring, because all the players are subjected to the same games and not all they get injured,” added Montaña.
Testimonials from footballers who have had to fight against injuries
There are players who have suffered from this problem on more than one occasion.. Julián Téllez, today a Win Sports panelist, had to undergo surgery eight times when he was a soccer player, four of them for knee problems.
“The cruciate ligament, before, made them retire immediately. Now, with medical treatment, he can recover. My recommendation is to take the necessary and sufficient time to recover and return to playing. Doctors say you can play again after six months, and that’s true. But that could be detrimental to the joint over time. With my experience, I recommend taking between eight and ten months to play again,” said Téllez.
This is an injury that is also common in women’s soccer. Three of the historical figures of the Colombian National Team have suffered it on more than one occasion: Catalina Usme, Catalina Pérez and Natalia Gaitán.
“It’s not that injuries are appearing more than before. What I feel is that now more attention is being paid to it, they are more viral and more attention is being paid to them,” said Gaitán, current Santa Fe player, who suffered two, one when she played for Valencia, in Spain, and another in Seville. “It was a process of learning to know my body. I was fortunate, in the first injury, to have a physiotherapist at Valencia who helped me a lot, who was almost like a psychologist. The second one hit me harder, maybe my body was giving me signals. But I came back fine, today I don’t have any problems.”
Germán Ochoa, son of one of the most successful coaches in the history of Colombian soccer, Gabriel Ochoa Uribe, and a renowned sports doctor, gave his theory about why these injuries occur. “In professional athletes, one of the explanations is the use, abuse and overuse of sporting activity. Rest times are insufficient, the body needs to rest, you have to have a balance,” he explained.
“The anterior cruciate ligament is damaged because these athletes, with so much competition and such long seasons, show muscle fatigue very quickly and it is the muscle, associated with the brain connection, that provides protection so that the knee does not suffer. When there is a lot of fatigue, brain concentration decreases,” he added.
PABLO ROMERO AND JOSÉ ORLANDO ASCENCIO
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