Chelsea legend Petr Cech has revealed how his wife was left unhappy over his return from a horrific head injury. The former Arsenal goalkeeper suffered a fractured skull following a collision with Reading‘s Stephen Hunt during a Premier League clash at the Madejski Stadium in October 2006.
He was told by some that he would never be able to play football again because of the damage caused. However, Cech was back in action within three months, wearing the protective headgear he would later become synonymous with.
Cech made his comeback in a Premier League match against Liverpool in January 2007, which resulted in a 2-0 defeat for Chelsea. While the Czech shot-stopper was pleased to be back on the pitch, he said the news he was travelling to Anfield did not go down well with his wife Martina.
Speaking during an interview with ex-Manchester United and Wrexham keeper Ben Foster, he disclosed how a conversation with Chelsea boss Jose Mourinho led to his return from the life-threatening injury. Despite admitting to finding it tough to adjust to wearing a helmet during matches, the 42-year-old said he soon got used to the change.
Cech said on Foster’s ‘Fozcast‘ podcast: “When we came to a point with the head injury, he [Mourinho] said, ‘do you want to play?’ And I said to him, ‘Well, I had one training session, but now I actually feel like I’m ready to go.’ I think my wife was not happy when I said I was travelling to Liverpool. She was like, ‘I’ve heard this one before.’
“She goes ‘are you not playing?’ I said, ‘No, no, don’t worry, it’s just to be with the team’. We lost 2-0 and it was okay. I made a couple of saves and felt quite okay. With the goals. I couldn’t do much.
“The only problem I had in that game was the helmet. With the noise, I had a funny feeling like my head was in a tumble dryer. I’d never experienced that before, because when I trained, everything I did was with the helmet, but on my own.
“You don’t really get the noise of 45,000 people in a big game. That was one of the issues I was fighting throughout the game but then I got used to it, and it was all fine.”
Cech has previously described coming back from the injury as the biggest challenge of his career. But he said that he never had any doubt that he was going to defy the odds.
“There were a lot of people saying it was probably the end and that I would not play again,” he told Arsenal Player. “You get so many people telling you that you should take time, you should take the whole year off and build up slowly to get back.
“I wanted to get back playing as this is what I enjoy the most and it was a challenge to prove to everyone that I don’t need a whole year. It was a massive challenge for me because there were days when you just feel like it will never happen, it’s not going well, you don’t feel well and you think, ‘Ok what am I going to do.’
“But then you had days where all the positive things came back and I was really happy with the way I did it. I enjoyed the rest of the season when I came back because it was kind of a bonus. Nobody expected me to play so I really enjoyed that because I played with less pressure as I was appreciating the fact that I was back.”
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