“Find someone else to win the Champions League,” Alexia Putellas told Barcelona head coach Jonatan Giraldez.
“I’m considering all possible scenarios, even retiring and becoming a coach. I don’t know if it’s over for me — I don’t know if I’ll be back at this level,” she told her agent Josep Maria Figueres in a phone call just after she was injured.
It was July 5, 2022 — the European Championship started the next day. Putellas, in one of Spain’s last training sessions, dribbled past the defence and was about to shoot with her right foot. Within the same movement, Barcelona’s star midfielder completed a little jump and immediately felt a crunch. She fell to the floor and could not finish the action. She was helped up, took a step and her knee went out from underneath her.
Her worst nightmare had become a reality: she had suffered an anterior cruciate ligament injury on the eve of the Euros.
“I don’t know how to pray, but I prayed in every possible way that it wasn’t what I thought,” Putellas said in her Amazon Prime documentary ‘Alexia: Labor Omnia Vincit’ (Latin for ‘work conquers all’).
- We’ll be covering the UEFA Women’s Champions League final tomorrow via our live blog (live from 11am tomorrow, June 03)
To say that the injury struck…
