Excl: “Long, Serious Rehab…” – Expert Gives Grim Verdict On Liverpool Star’s Injury Timeline | OneFootball

Liverpool’s woes were worsened before their departure from the Champions League against PSG on Tuesday night as Hugo Ekitike was stretchered off after 28 minutes with a now-confirmed ruptured Achilles tendon.   The club’s official statement said he sustained the serious Achilles injury on Tuesday night “after a slip on the turf”, which was an issue many of the players felt, with Nuno Mendes also being one of the players coming off injured.   It’s a season-ending injury for the Frenchman, whose international manager, Didier Deschamps, has confirmed he will not be available for the World Cup this summer.

The internet’s injury analyst, “Physio Scout”, known for identifying injuries and the length of recovery for footballers via his Instagram and X pages, spoke to Redmen TV about the severity of the injury and how long the recovery will take.

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 The injury is labelled as “one of the most serious soft tissue injuries you can have”, due to it being the most essential structure for acceleration and deceleration, which are explosive movements Ekitike rely on.   The way an Achilles rupture happens is “typical” to how Ekitike went down, as the 23-year-old was trying to push off and sudden acceleration forwards, which is how a typical Achilles rupture happens.

As to why the injury might have happened, there’s no one-way answer; it’s thought that a mixture of extreme unluckiness and the fact that Ekitike made ten sprints in 28 minutes (a high amount for a striker that early in the game) contributed to the injury.

News on his recovery also doesn’t make for good reading, as the Physio Scout also mentions that “Achilles ruptures can be quite nasty because the road back can be longer and more complex, and the calf and Achilles complex can become weak for quite some time.”

Speaking to Dan on Redmen Plus, the expert said the best-case scenario is a 7-month period out with no setbacks and an extremely smooth and fast recovery, as “he will have the best medical professionals around him and the right team to push for the lower time frame (7–9-month range), but they have to be careful as other injuries can occur.”

However, it is looking like it will take the club’s top scorer this season nearly a year to recover and get back to full fitness on the pitch, as “it can be a bit longer than that because he’s a striker and very explosive; he may need more than the 9-month frame.”

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The Physio Scout also said it was “very similar [recovery] to an ACL injury in how the recovery is graded and what he has to get through”

The process of recovery starts “in a boot after surgery, often with the foot elevated and pointed down to reduce the stress on the tendon, and he’ll be on crutches as well. “Once he comes out of the boot, the focus will be on normal walking again, getting normal movement back and rebuilding the calf and Achilles complex as well, just building strength and power.”

“From about the 3–4-month stage, we look at very safe progression, going back to the gym, building back up into faster running, sprinting and cutting. Once he gets past the six-month stage, he will have upgraded his recovery to be able to go to full match fitness. But the timeline is 7-9 months before returning to the pitch, but we may not see his full performance until later after that.”

Psychologically, the trust in his body may take a hit back, but “the coaches will be making sure that he is exposed to these repeated sprint efforts a thousand times before he returns to the match.”

Just like most other injuries, it’ll be the case for Ekitike that he will sustain more smaller injuries before he reinjures his Achilles-calf complex, as there’s also a possibility he puts more weight on one leg compared to the other when he returns, which can also potentially create a huge psychological impact on him in the long run to trust his body to perform how it did before the injury.

If you’d like to see the work that the expert physio produces, he is @PhysioScout on Instagram, YouTube and X (formerly Twitter) and will be giving verdicts on more injuries going forward, with the hope it’ll be more positive for our players in the future.