‘I was forced to retire from football after doctors drilled a hole in my skull’

Ryan Mason has bravely opened up on the awful head injury that required urgent surgery and ultimately ended his football career.

The interim Tottenham Hotspur assistant, 31, suffered a sickening clash of heads with Gary Cahill during a Premier League match between Chelsea and Hull City in January 2017. After being assessed by the Tigers medical staff, Mason was stretchered off for immediate treatment and in hospital, he awoke with 14 metal plates, with 28 screws and 45 staples to hold them in place, and a six-inch scar across his head.

Throughout the remainder of the year, Mason focused his rehabilitation on an eventual return to football but in February 2018 he announced his retirement from the professional game due to risks associated with the extent of his injury.

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Speaking to BT Sport host Jake Humphrey on the High Performance Podcast, Mason recalls the "unbearable" pain of the incident but how he was driven on making a return to football.

"The pain was pretty unbearable, I could tell it was quite a serious thing, the body was just telling me that," he said. "I heard voices, people speaking, the process of getting off the pitch, putting a neck brace on, going into the ambulance and going to hospital, it was very very painful. I'd be lying if I [say] I wasn't scared and fearing a lot."

He added: "You could tell by the look on people's faces, my parents were worried, my now-wife was at my bedside, scared. My auntie, uncle and sister would walk into the room and burst out crying, it was like, 'woah'."

"I guess I was quite lucky at that stage as I didn't get to see myself. The body is powerful. The body was telling me I needed to sleep, I was listening and sleeping. It was a feeling of 'I need to get out of this hospital, I need to get back to playing football' that was my initial thoughts, which were crazy at the time. But I just wanted to get better."

"I didn't know that I had a tube in my head, that they had to drain the blood from my brain. Four days in a doctor came in and wanted to take the tube out of my head, I was like 'woah, I've got a tube in my head'? The next minute he is pulling that out and stitching the skin of my head."

Explaining the severity of the situation, Mason continued: "Just before I went in to get scanned I went unresponsive, so at that point, it is code red, very serious.

"They drilled through my skull to start draining the blood as soon as possible, and that bought time to go through the operating theatre to open me up and see what's going on."

Following the departure of Antonio Conte, Mason was appointed interim assistant manager until the end of the 2022/23 season. He previously held the role of interim manager after Jose Mourinho was axed days before the League Cup final.

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