Mikel Arteta has described witnessing the head injury sustained by Wolves striker Raul Jimenez at Arsenal last season as one of the scariest moments of his career.
Jimenez fractured his skull and was knocked unconscious after clashing heads with Arsenal defender David Luiz while competing for the ball at a corner.
The striker was taken off the pitch and straight to hospital, where after surgery he was forced out of action for eight months.
Jimenez has now made a full recovery, however, and he will be back at Emirates Stadium for the first time since the injury in November 2020 when Wolves travel to North London on Thursday night.
When asked if Jimenez’s injury was one of the scariest moments of his football career, Arteta said: “Yeah. I have had others but that was one of them.
“Straight away you see the reaction, the anxiety that suddenly is in the team doctors and everybody involved trying to assess what was happening, it was frightening. Thank god it ended the right way, but it looked really, really bad.”
Jimenez was unable to train with his teammates for six months after the incident and he still plays with a protective headband.
Arsenal, particularly Luiz, were impacted by the shocking injury too and Arteta has revealed that they kept in touch with Jimenez during his road to recovery.
“Yeah of course we were [in contact with Jimenez] and David was as well because he was directly involved and he was really affected by that,” said Arteta. “We are colleagues in the end. We share the same profession and industry. When something like that happens you are emotionally involved.
“In the case of Raul, it was a really scary moment. Thanks to the medical team, they probably saved in that moment something that could have been much worse.”
