Just one month after Rob Holding suffered an ACL injury, we lost Hector Bellerin too.
The Spain international went down unchallenged during our Premier League game against Chelsea, and would consequently miss the remainder of the 2018/19 season.
Holding was watching on from inside Emirates Stadium and couldn’t help but get emotional when he saw his good friend leave the field on a stretcher.
“I just remember him going down off the ball and then thinking, ‘That’s not good’” he said. “All my mates were texting the group chat that Hector’s gone down. They were watching at home so they saw the videos and the replays, and I just remember watching it and then just thinking, ‘Oh no’.
“Then it literally just hit me, and I just started crying. I’ve got no idea why. I obviously love Hector to pieces and stuff, but I didn’t think I’d cry about another guy’s injured. It’s because it was so recent to my surgery, it was literally four weeks after. I knew everything he was about to go through and I just got overcome with emotion a bit.
“It was something that I told Hector a couple of days later. I told the Doc and was like, ‘Doc, it just hit me and I was just sat up there with tears coming down face, out my eyes, I didn’t know what was going on’. He went, ‘It’s still a bit new to you so the emotional stuff is still there’. So yeah, that was that one.
“He had all his rehab out in Spain,” Holding added. “For the first couple of weeks, he was close to his family and that was important. That’s why he chose to do it there. He came back with a smile on his face, walked in like nothing had happened, so it was good to see. I’ve been with him since, just grafting away.”
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