CAZORLA

Santi Cazorla will never forget the moment he walked back into the Spain dressing room, following the hardest four years of his life.

Some of the faces had changed, but some remained the same as they had always been. There to greet him again were his friends; his team-mates from happy days gone by: Sergio Ramos, Jordi Alba, Sergio Busquets, Jesus Navas and more. Players he’d won European Championships with. Players he thought he’d never play with again.

“I arrived and they said, ‘Hey, what are you doing here?!’” chuckles Cazorla as he recalls that day in June. “I just said, ‘I don’t know, my friends! It’s surprising, isn’t it?’”

He’s still surprised as we chat today, inside the mini-stadium at Villarreal’s training base. It’s 20 degrees in November, but it’s difficult to tell whether the warm glow is coming from the sky or the man opposite us. Few people on Earth can be happier than Cazorla right now, as he tells FourFourTwo about the remarkable second instalment of a career that looked set for a premature end.

It’s a second instalment that even he didn’t expect, but the seemingly impossible has now become a reality. At the age of 35 – two years after nearly losing his right leg, two years after almost conceding defeat and announcing his retirement – Cazorla is a regular in the Spain team once more.

THE INJURY

For a long time, Cazorla feared a 2015 match against England had been his 76th and final appearance for his country. He had scored the second goal of a dominant Spain victory that night, opening up his body and expertly using his left foot to pass the ball into the bottom corner of the net, in off the left-hand upright.

By then, Cazorla had already been struggling with injury problems for two years – problems that began early in his second