Liverpool 'refused to accept Sissoko diagnosis'

Club doctor Mark Waller has revealed Liverpool refused to accept the initial diagnosis that Mohamed Sissoko would never play again after his eye injury, despite the the midfielder being “blind in his right eye for 36 hours”.

Sissoko was kicked on the head during Liverpool’s Champions League game against Benfica last month, and one of the original doctors who treated the Mali international in Lisbon feared for the player’s sight.

But in a Liverpoolfc.tv interview Dr Waller said: “In the first 24 hours we had to listen to the opinion of one eminent specialist, who knows far more about the condition than I do, but we decided we weren’t going to accept that a 21-year-old had an injury that was not going to allow him to play football again.

“It’s been well publicised one of the doctors in the unit over in Lisbon stated the best-case scenario was that Momo could only get back 20% and there was no treatment for his condition. We were not prepared to accept that.”

Sissoko was flown home the day after the match and placed under the care of the St Paul’s eye unit in Liverpool’s University Hospital.

Now, a month later, Sissoko has recovered enough to train and play again, and the club will experiment with the sort of eye protection worn by Spurs’ Edgar Davids.

Waller continued: “On the day after the injury if you shone a torch into his eye from two or three centimetres away he couldn’t see it. A very bright light being directed into his eye from close range was just blank to him. Basically he was totally blind in his right eye for the first 36 hours.”

Now Sissoko is ready to play again, and Waller added: “Provided you have what we call 6/18 vision or binocular vision then you can play football. His is much better than that. It’s sufficient to drive and sufficient for him to play football.”

Sissoko says of those first few worrying days: “It was an awful time. There were lots of lonely hours at home when I was very worried and very scared about what was going to happen. It was such a bad injury.

“I don’t mind admitting I cried a lot. I thought: ’This can’t be happening to me.’ It didn’t seem possible I could be in this situation. I just had to lie there and rest and hope my vision would get better. It was only a couple of weeks but it felt much, much longer.”

He added: “I wasn’t happy when the Portuguese doctor said football was finished for me. I didn’t like that. I didn’t believe that. We went to see other specialists and thankfully things have got a lot better.

“Three weeks ago I had zero vision in my right eye. Now it’s about 80% so that is a quick recovery. It’s hard to say if it’ll ever be perfect. There’s a chance it might but also a chance it might not. Only time will tell. The big thing for me is I can play football again. That’s all I want to do.”