“I should not have continued playing.”
There is a photo of Jan Vertonghen and Jose Mourinho, taken in the spring of last year, in which the defender looks solemn as he walks towards the substitutes bench, while his manager remained focused on the game at hand. At the time, it was considered a perfect portrayal of the mood of both player and coach, and a breakdown in relations between the two. But the truth is a little more complicated.
Vertonghen has said there was never any ill feeling between him and Mourinho during his last of eight seasons at Tottenham Hotspur, but that glazed expression was due to a realisation that he “just couldn’t anymore.”
“Everybody thought I was angry at Mourinho but at that moment I just couldn’t go on anymore. I had only one year of contract left, so I had to play. But when I played, I played badly,” the Benfica player told Belgian outlet Sporza.
“The fact I got benched had nothing to do with him. I was in a period I could not bring what I should have. I even though he played me a lot compared to how I performed.”
Vertonghen says that period of poor form was partly a result of his continued participation in playing matches following a head injury he sustained against Ajax in the Champions League the previous season.
Spurs had almost reached their first ever Champions League final and would eventually win the tie in the most dramatic of circumstances, but at what cost for Vertonghen?
“Lots of people don’t know it but I suffered a lot from that hit: dizziness and headaches,” Vertonghen says.
“This is now the first time I speak about it. I should not have continued playing, it affected me in total for nine months and that’s why I couldn’t bring on the field what I wanted to.
“I just didn’t know what to do. It was game after game and training after training. Every time there was a new impact.
“Then the lockdown came and I was able to rest for two months, after that it was a lot better.”
This revelation comes at a time when head injuries and their long term effects are at the centre of footballing discourse. Raul Jimenez recently sustained a fractured skull in an aerial collision with Arsenal’s David Luiz, who was allowed to continue playing until half-time.
That decision to allow Luiz to play on prompted outrage from the medical community.
Luke Griggs, Deputy Chief Executive at Headway, a charity which works to improve the lives of people after they suffer brain injuries, told JOE: “You can’t just run off a brain injury and you can’t see the damage done behind the skull,” he says. “You have to trust the experts and it must be taken out of the players’ hands. We know they’re intrinsically competitive – you have to be to get to that level – and they want to stay on the pitch so won’t always be honest about whether they are feeling the effects of concussion.”
