Baby has lived in his stage at Rayo Vallecano the toughest face of football, an injury that kept him off the pitch for 14 months. In the first round match against Ponferradina last season, with hardly any contact with the rival player, the Portuguese suffered a cruciate ligament tear that in principle it was going to suppose six months of absence but that finally it ended up being more than a year.
In this 2021 he has returned to enjoy football, accumulating seven titles in the league with Rayo and has granted an interview to the newspaper A Bola remembering the hard times he had to live and describing how it was the moment when he broke down. “When I jumped I felt a pain that gave me the sensation that something serious was happening. They took me crying on a stretcher and when hot I felt that the pain was passing and that I was gaining more strength in my knee, but after 20 minutes I felt the pain again and had few doubts. A week later they operated on me. “
A torn ligament is one of the hardest injuries for a footballer, and the recovery time is usually even longer than expected. “In theory they say six months, but in practice it almost always takes longer because it requires a lot of physical therapy. I was standing for 14 months, it seemed like an eternity“says Baby in the newspaper of his country.
Being on leave for so long ended up affecting him to such an extent that he lost the will to fight, although fortunately the story could have a happy ending. “The doctors said they were going to do everything possible to help me but time passed and the recovery was not progressing, they went round and round to find a solution but there was no way. I cried every day, it was crazy, I got depressed and had no strength to fight“.