The Tottenham Hotspur teenager missed a large chunk of last season and has now opened up on exactly what he was dealing with
Mikey Moore has opened up on the virus that sparked a heart scare last season and the frustrating absence for him and the supporters at Tottenham.
The 18-year-old is currently dazzling on loan at Rangers with the fans of the Scottish side desperate for the Glasgow giants to sign him permanently. Spurs are not keen though on losing their talented academy product and new boss Roberto De Zerbi will take a good look at the attacker this summer when he returns from a huge developmental campaign north of the border.
However, last season, just as Moore was finally starting to break through at Tottenham under then boss Ange Postecoglou, he suffered a virus that kept him out from early November until he finally played again in mid-January last year. Due to his age, details of his ailment were kept from the public domain.
Amid the fan speculation Postecoglou had told football.london back then: "Look, I come out here and I want to be as transparent as I can, but this is a 17-year-old boy. I don’t like talking about what they have and what they don’t have. It’s nothing serious, but you know, he’s 17. We’re going to take our time, and I don’t like this kind of constant, not from you by the way, but I’ve just heard other bits and pieces of people speculating, Come on. I mean, like, if it’s your 17-year-old son, you don’t want everyone to know what he has or hasn’t got.
"It’s nothing serious. It’s nothing long-term. It’s just that he’s a young lad and he’s only 17. He’s a big part of this football club, and we will protect him, and we’ll be guided by how he feels, how he recovers from an illness. Young people will recover at different rates. He’ll be back. He’s still here. He’s part of what we’re doing and he’ll be back in the next few weeks, but again he’s missed a lot of football. We’ve got to bear in mind that he’s 17."
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Now Moore has opened up on exactly what happened during those months out at Tottenham last season.
"I was playing really well and started to find my feet in the first team just before the Galatasaray game. I trained two days before it and I was set to start or make an appearance in that game. I went for a driving lesson at the time that night and all of a sudden I felt a bit of pain in my chest," he said in a short Spurs documentary on his loan at Rangers.
"The doctor called me in and said to forget about football for now. It came back that I had myocarditis, which is a virus that went to the heart and gave me the pains in my heart. I was lucky that I caught it early because I am not sure what could have happened after that and whether it could have caused extra things.
"But from what I know, it is not something that can really reoccur. I think I was in bed for six weeks and wasn't allowed to do any exercise.
"There were a lot of rumours at that time and it was tough to deal with. Those six weeks were not six weeks of improving in a gym like you would normally do if you were injured. Right now, I feel at my best and feel like how I felt when I first started playing at Tottenham. That is all done now and put behind me. That's it really."