Scott McTominay has revealed how his cardiac issue emerged just before Scotland's FIFA World Cup campaign kicked off. It was initially disclosed in September that McTominay had been diagnosed with a mild benign arrhythmia, an irregular heartbeat. While classified as non-threatening, it necessitated surgical intervention and kept him out of action for both Napoli and Scotland.
The midfielder first detected the symptoms several days before Scotland's opening World Cup fixture against Haiti. Recognising it wasn't simply pre-match jitters, he informed manager Steve Clarke, who treated the matter with appropriate seriousness. McTominay received a police escort to a Boston hospital, where medical staff administered anaesthetic to sedate him before restoring his heart's normal rhythm through shock therapy.
The 29-year-old discussed his experience publicly for the first time at a press conference ahead of Scotland's UEFA Nations League match against North Macedonia on Friday, speaking via The Mirror.
"Atrial fibrillation is a fairly normal routine thing for people in general," he said. "They might not know that they have it. But when you're an elite athlete across football or sport, you know if you've got something that's different. Whenever you're running, you check your pulse and it's got a slight irregular beat there."
He described the sensation in detail: "It feels like your heart's coming out of your chest. That's the sensation that you have. That it's pumping, but not a regular heartbeat, like bum, bum, bum, bum. Mine was going bum, bu-bu-bum, bum, bu-bu-bum. So you know the difference."
Asked whether the condition weighed on him during matches, McTominay said: "Was it on my mind in the games? No, I put it to bed. I tried my best, anyway. Whenever you go under anaesthetic and you have to get put to sleep, it decreases the athletic performance a little bit, as well as your sleep and stuff like that. But you have to get back round to doing it again. It was far from ideal but those are the cards you're dealt, there's nothing you can do about it."
Scotland opened their World Cup campaign with a 1-0 victory over Haiti in Boston, but McTominay was understandably below his best. Steve Clarke's side subsequently fell to defeats against Brazil and Morocco, exiting at the group stage and drawing considerable scrutiny toward their influential midfielder.
McTominay insisted he would never have sat out those fixtures and remained unfazed by the backlash. "You know yourself as a professional footballer if you're not quite where you should be," he said. "You just try to block it out. Were there concerns from my family about playing? No, I wouldn't have listened to it. They had just flown 10 hours for the first game of the World Cup."
He added: "I didn't sit there thinking I might not play. That would never be the case. I was always going to play in that game. Maybe selfishly, I don't know. I'd worked for 20 years as a young footballer and as a professional to get to that point. To try and play well at a World Cup. Players play with injuries all the time when they're not quite right. But I was fully functional."
Reflecting on the aftermath of Scotland's group-stage exit, McTominay said: "It wasn't easy after the World Cup. I probably had two or three weeks of putting my head in the sand, thinking we let one slip. That was the bottom line. It took me longer than it normally would to get over disappointment in football. The reason why I felt like that was because we could have done more. It was probably one of the worst moments of my career."
