Skip to main content

Missing link Robben ready to return

Robben suffered a hamstring injury on June 5 in their final warm-up match against Hungary and joined the squad a week later in South Africa after five days of treatment back home.

"Playing against Cameroon is possible," Robben told reporters. "Risk is a big word as we already have taken a risk by choosing an aggressive treatment, where we could have written off the World Cup and said just go on holiday."

The questions about a 'missing link' in the successful, though uninspiring, Dutch team who have claimed clinical wins over Denmark and Japan, have made Robben a hot media topic but the nature of the injury has left him on the sidelines.

"You have to be 100 percent to play," he said. "So far we have been considering the situation day-by-day as it happened only two weeks ago and normally it would take four to six weeks to recover from such an injury," he added.

"Yesterday I had a tough training session, with some good five-a-side matches, and I came through well. I don't think there's a big risk that anything will happen to the hamstring."

At Euro 2004 in Portugal he missed the opening match against Germany, while two years later at the World Cup he scored the only goal in the opener against Serbia & Montenegro before being rested in the group's dead rubber against Argentina.

"It has been hard so far," said Robben. "I noticed during the first two matches that it is painful if you can't play and just have to stay on the sidelines."

"The recuperation was no fun at all and sometimes I felt like a martyr but I knew why I did it," he added.

Follow FFT.com on Twitter
Join FFT.com on Facebook