As Argentina will soon be celebrating the 2022 World Cup title’s first anniversary, ESPN are having a documentary about it.
The outlet is slowly releasing some quotes from the players who were most prominent, and Aston Villa star Emiliano Martinez is one of them.
On their website, ESPN now reveals that the goalkeeper actually had an injury during the campaign, and needed medical help for some of the important matches.
“The doctors can tell. We goalkeepers like to play football tennis when we’re warming up, to have a good laugh. I tried a header and said ‘Tincho, the neck’. I was going to do a bit of handball, and I couldn’t move. We’re going to play Holland, and El Huevo says to me ‘what did you do’. I got to the dressing room and I said to Rolón ‘it hurts here, put me in there’. They put a needle in me, I screamed, it was like an anaesthetic, it put me to sleep, and I couldn’t feel all that part. They told me that they had never infiltrated a torticollis, and we hugged each other after the game,” Martinez told ESPN.
“I didn’t feel anything when I was playing, but my body felt it, because I never have a stiff neck on the day of a game, I never have a cramp before a game, my back hurt… It was the only message my body was sending that I was under pressure.”
It’s fair to say that Martinez’s career is now divided between before and after the World Cup, as the Aston Villa goalkeeper became a national hero with that title.
The player had previously won a couple of FA Cups and three Community Shields with Arsenal, and now has one Copa America and one World Cup added to his achievements.
It remains to be seen whether Aston Villa had the knowledge that he had been going through those efforts to continue playing in Qatar, though, although it’s pretty clear that he won’t have any regrets since everything went so well for him and Argentina.
