Exclusive: How Corry Evans feared for his life during recovery from fractured skull

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It is when you study the X-ray of Corry Evans’ skull that you better grasp the force of the impact it sustained, and the scale of the damage he suffered. The images of his bloodied, contorted face - nose split and eyes almost welded shut through bruising - are pretty gruesome and briefly left him unrecognisable to his three, startled young children. Yet the X-ray provides a jigsaw of the wreckage caused by an accidental high boot to the head and, at the same time, a reminder for the Blackburn Rovers and Northern Ireland midfielder of how much worse things could have been. On the face of it, you wonder how things could have been any worse. He was hit with a force equivalent to someone planting a hammer directly between his eyes and his skull is now held together by a series of titanium plates and a maze of almost 50 screws. But the situation could have been so much more serious and, as Evans relives that dark day at Ewood Park in January in granular detail, it is still possible, six months on, to detect the relief in his voice. “With the frontal lobe, there are two layers before you hit the brain,” Evans explains. “I was lucky - I only pierced the first layer. There’s sort of an air gap between the next layer and then it’s your brain so the surgeon said I was very lucky that I didn’t pierce the second layer because that’s straight into the brain - fragments of bone into there and there’s a risk of brain damage.” Just over a fortnight ago, Evans made his long-awaited return to action, scoring in Blackburn’s 3-1 win against Bristol City and earning the man-of-the-match trophy. It was the sort of euphoric feeling Ryan Mason never got to experience again. Thirteen months after fracturing his skull in a game for Hull City against Chelsea in 2017, the midfielder was forced to retire. Mason’s injury was one of the first things to cross Evans’s mind when a CT scan in hospital revealed a fractured frontal lobe. A shattered eye-socket he had guessed at, a broken nose, too, but a fractured skull? “When you hear that you just think the worst. I couldn’t quite believe it,” he recalled. “‘Career’s done, how am I going to get back?’ I’d seen similar injuries - Ryan Mason at Hull. It ended his career ultimately. So that was in my head at the start.”

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