Ben Arfa on De Jong, Newcastle United and almost losing a leg.
Posted on April 5th, 2011 | 48 Comments |
Firstly, on his return to Tyneside after recuperating at the Fédération Française de Football’s centre of excellence at Clairefontaine near Paris he commented:
“It is great to back in Newcastle and back with the lads.
“I joined in with the warm-up this morning and managed to do a bit of light training on my own, and it was good to see the rest of the players after such a long time.
He also had words of thanks for both the club and the fans for their support during such a difficult period, saying:
“I will be continuing to follow my rehabilitation programme now I am back in Newcastle, and would like to thank the fans for their support while I have been out injured.
He also expressed his great gratitude to the club itself for their support adding:
“Newcastle showed me so much respect and a lot of love that I want to give back to them.
“I will give everything I can for this club because they trusted me and, for a human being, that is really touching.”
“I want to do a lot for this club because they gave me great confidence. For a human being, that’s huge. It touched me.”
On his reflections on life out of the game he said:
“You take a blow, that’s for sure, and I started seeing myself as someone whose career was over, who no longer plays football.
“That brought me closer to my friends and I started to really think about things because I wasn’t in the spotlight.
“I travelled a bit and the break did me a lot of good and hopefully it stands me in good stead for the future.
Shockingly, he also referred to a dangerous period in his treatment, where he could, potentially, have lost a leg owing to infection if surgeons did not act with the greatest sppeed.
On this he revealed:
“I needed a second operation because I had an infection.
“It was a big infection which could have been very dangerous.
“I was told that I could have had my leg cut off if they didn’t operate on me very quickly.”
Let us all be thankful that this didn’t come to pass!
Moving back to shortly after the incident, he spoke on the controversial Manchester City “hatchetman”, Nigel De Jong, whose vicious “scissor tackle” led to his long period out of the game. This was a tackle for which De Jong didn’t even receive a yellow card with the referee exhorting Ben Arfa to get up afterwards despite the noise of his leg breaking being clearly audible. De Jong apologised to him by text message after the assault and on this he commented:
“I do not really understand English. But in his text, he told me he did not intend to hurt me and he was sorry. I told him it was okay, it was football.
“Anyway, the problem is that there was not even fault. I think he can get away with anything if there are no sanctions.”
“I do not want to come down on the referees, but we still have to protect players a little more so if he wants to tackle like this again he thinks twice.”
Well there’s certainly much food for thought there. Speaking in another interview, which I covered here, Newcastle United’s manager, Alan Pardew said that he would not rush him back to first team team football, suggesting strongly that he may not make an appearence at all this season unless it was in the last three games and the circumstances were right. This is probably a good thing in the long term. Here’s hoping that his recovery continues well, and that he never experiences an injury of such severity again.
FFS you still going on about this? It wasn’t even a foul !
And as for – “the referee exhorting Ben Arfa to get up afterwards despite the noise of his leg breaking being clearly audible”
– I’m sorry but this goes beyond the normal blog bollocks, you are a fekkin liar if you claim to have heard his leg break. I was sitting in row E block 138 so it was almost right in front of me. We heard fek all. You cnuts were at the opposite end of the stadium (or more likely watching a pirate feed in the pub).