Petr Cech will forever be hailed as a legend at Chelsea and one of the best goalkeepers to have graced the Premier League.
Many Chelsea fans will look back at October 14, 2006 as a time Cech will never forget after he suffered a life threatening injury following a collision with Stephen Hunt led to a depressed skull fracture.
It took Cech over a hundred days to recover from that injury, but the Blues goalkeeper has looked back at a time when he suffered with his two shoulders badly injured.
“There was one thing I never talked about, and people didn’t know at the time,” he told the official Chelsea website. “Halfway through my first season at Chelsea I broke the labrum in my shoulder. I carried on and finished the season.
“It felt like during the summer it would recover. It didn’t! During the second season I already had a massive problem with my shoulder and I was protecting it. Then, in the first part of my second season, I did exactly the same thing to my other shoulder. So I played my second season with broken shoulders!
“I was trying to get the pain low for the games and find ways to train properly so I didn’t feel the unbelievable pain every day, which was difficult to avoid. “I thought about having surgery during the second season, but I didn’t want to risk missing the World Cup in Germany that summer. Nobody really knew how long it would take me to come back.
“To my relief I decided to have the surgery after the World Cup. I came back fast from that and I was enjoying games and not having pain while training and moving. A few games later, we played Reading!”