Last March, Mouctar Diakhaby suffered a horror knee injury after an unfortunate collision with Real Madrid midfielder Aurelien Tchouameni during Valencia’s 2-2 draw with the 36-time La Liga champions at the Mestalla. He was immediately ruled out for the remainder of the season, and there were fears that he could be forced to retire from professional football due to how bad the damage was.
Diakhaby underwent surgery soon after the incident, and recovery then began. It was a long and difficult process, but in the end, he made his return for Valencia during the 7-1 defeat at Barcelona last month, and in his first La Liga start of the season against Leganes last weekend, he scored.
Diakhaby spoke to the media on Thursday (via Relevo), and he opened up on the recovery process that he went through.
“I knew that the nerve was not touched, from the beginning the surgeon told me, and this made me take it calmly. Now I’m focused on playing again. I wasn’t afraid because in my head when I did the surgery I knew what I had and I was clear about it, I had no doubts about it.
“The question then was how am I going to return. How the knee was going to respond. I had no doubts that I was going to return, the option of not playing football again did not exist for me, mine was very serious, but for me, it was not so serious, or that is how I focused it mentally. That helped me to overcome this injury and not have that fear.”
Diakhaby also revealed that he was in contact with Tchouameni throughout his recovery period.
“I have received several messages from Tchouameni. He was a person who wrote to me a lot during the injury, as we have a mutual friend who is Ferland Mendy. His words have given me a lot of motivation to get up from this injury.”
