Sports injuries explained: The broken metatarsal

It's cut down David Beckham, Wayne Rooney and even Roy Keane in their prime, but what do you know about the infamous broken metatarsal?

In what is now a commonly known fact, and something that has been proven by scientists and countless sports injury experts, the metatarsal bone in a person’s foot didn’t exist until just before the 2002 World Cup.

At that time, David Beckham was the captain and golden boy of the English national team and all set to lead the Three Lions to a glorious triumph in Japan and South Korea.

Then, a couple of months before the tournament, disaster struck. Becks was chopped down mercilessly in a tackle by Deportivo La Coruna’s Aldo Duscher while playing for Man United in the Champions League and while he writhed in agony on the Old Trafford turf, England’s hopes of success looked doomed.

He did make it to the World Cup, but was a shadow of his fully-fit self, so much so that he jumped out of a tackle with Roberto Carlos as England went out ignominiously at the hands of Brazil, when Ronaldinho lobbed Seaman (in a completely different way to what he was doing in this video).

Following Beckham’s metatarsal experience, whether they were simply sympathy pains or not, a raft of sportsmen suddenly began being plagued by this seemingly recently discovered injury. Gary Neville, Wayne Rooney, and Steven Gerrard all broke metatarsal bones at one point or another, while before he dug a huge hole for himself with some incendiary comments about his teammates on MUTV, Roy Keane did likewise in his last ever game for Man United.

Becks in agony in 2002: The birth of the broken metatarsal injury

Metatarsal injuries are, of course, not a new phenomenon at all but have merely attracted so much attention of late because, we can only assume, folks were tougher in the old days. Also, some experts attribute the recent increase to the flimsiness of the modern football boot, which offers far less protection than the ones that used to weigh half a stone back in the day.

In a nutshell, the metatarsals are five bones in the foot that connect the ankle bones to those in the toes and bear a significant amount of a person’s body weight. Injuries to them can be caused in a variety of different ways, be it through stress or overuse, twisting, or what seems to be the most common in football particularly, impact.

Injuries to the first metatarsal, (they start at your big toe and move across), second metatarsal and fifth metatarsal are thought to be most common, usually through impact, whereas the third and fourth, the longest and narrowest of the metatarsals, are most susceptible to stress fractures.

In all cases, rest is the only cure and lots of it. Once the injury has been initially treated via a plaster cast or a protective boot, it can take quite a long time before the ailment is fully healed, depending on the specific metatarsal bone and the person involved, as some are quicker healers than others.

For example, while Steven Gerrard (fifth metatarsal) took just over two months to return, Scott Parker didn’t play football for nearly nine months after breaking his second metatarsal in his Chelsea days.

It’s a bit of a tricky one then, but if it happens to you, you shouldn’t give up all hope. Take the case of misfiring, ex-England striker David Nugent, for example. He broke his fifth metatarsal and was back within six weeks.

His solution? Drinking loads and loads of milk. Them bones need calcium after all.