I said to the physio, ‘Look, I don’t care’ because, in my mind, I’d retired. “I think I was meant to be drug-tested but I just couldn’t be there. When the third happened, on the right knee again, his mind had already turned to the end.

The first was on his right knee, the second on his left. “For the first 15, 20 minutes after, I thought I was done for,” says Chris Cohen, the former Nottingham Forest midfielder and now Luton Town first-team coach, about his third ACL injury. But what must doing it for a second or even third time be like? The mind-numbing rehab, the hours, days and months spent in the gym while your team-mates are training and playing matches, the knowledge that it will be another season, if you’re lucky, before you’re playing again.Īn ACL injury is no longer a career-ender as it once was but it is still a guarantee of losing at least six months, more realistically 12, of a career that’s already pretty short. The pain, obviously, but mostly the despair: this has happened again. Derby’s Krystian Bielik, Blackburn’s Bradley Dack and, most recently, Wolves wing-back Jonny Castro Otto have all experienced the emotions that Cook did that day at Deepdale. I just knew what had happened and I knew what was to come.”Ĭook joined a list of players who have suffered a repeat ACL injury this season. The “it” was his anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) and the reason he knew was that he had done it before. “I just knew straight away that I’d done it,” the midfielder tells The Athletic.

Players wplayed ith acl tear