Morgan Gibbs-White opens up on horror injury and Nottingham Forest Europa League heartbreak
Morgan Gibbs-White opens up on horror injury and Nottingham Forest Europa League heartbreak
4 minutes
Morgan Gibbs-White has opened up on the horror injury that kept him out of Nottingham Forest’s Europa League decider with Aston Villa last season.
The playmaker sustained a severe facial wound during the Reds’ crucial 3-1 Premier League victory over Chelsea in May. It meant he missed the second leg of the Europa League semi-final against Villa which ended in heartbreak for the visitors.
Forest had taken a 1-0 advantage to Villa Park in the last-four tie but, without their talisman, were thumped 4-0 as their trophy hopes were dashed. Gibbs-White cut a frustrated figure as he watched from the sidelines that night, but he has revealed just how serious the injury was.
Recalling the moment he collided with Blues goalkeeper Robert Sanchez at Stamford Bridge, Gibbs-White told talkSPORT: “Didn’t feel an ounce of pain. It was weird. I didn’t feel any pain. I knew something had happened, just through the brute impact of how it happened.
“The doc came on and I answered every single question down to a T. I was literally fine. It just didn’t look fine.
“When I first had the impact, I was like, ‘Oh, that was rough, that was tough’. My eyes were closed as I was holding my head and I’ve gone to get up, put my hands and knees on the ground and just seen a pool of blood, just pouring, pouring, pouring. That was when I was like, ‘Oh no, what’s going on here?’. The doc has ran on and wrapped me up.
“The doctor took me into the medical room at Chelsea. As soon as I sat down and he started stitching me up, I said, ‘Whoa, whoa, doc, wait, can you see any bones broken? Will I be all right for Thursday (against Villa)?’.
“He said, ‘Morg, just forget about that right now, just let me focus on doing my job and what I’m doing’. That was the only thing I cared about, and still to this day it eats me up that I missed that game. Obviously I couldn’t do anything about it.”
Gibbs-White had a conversation with Vitor Pereira, head coach at the time, about whether he would be able to play in the West Midlands. In the event, he was named on the bench – but that was more of a morale-booster for his teammates, with no real consideration he would get out on the pitch.
“The doc and the manager were really good. Me being naive and, not the idiot that I am, but just the hunger in me wanted to play,” Forest’s No.10 said. “But then after a few days of seeing specialists, getting it stitched up, getting masks made and then getting the full detail of what happened, it was the right thing to not even be in.
“Without knowing what I did and if the doctor had just stitched me up and cracked on, then yeah, I probably would have (played). I fractured my skull, broke my nose inwards, fractured my skull behind my nose, eye socket fracture, a fracture on my eyebrow bone.
“What really settled it for me, where I turned around and was like, ‘Yeah, you know what? You guys are right, I can’t play in that game’ was when one of the specialists said that if it was five or four centimetres closer to my eye, it would have been a no-go. My eye would have been gone.
“As soon as he said that, I was like, ‘Right, yeah, OK’. But for some reason, there’s something still inside me that goes ‘Could I have played?’.”
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