With so many headlines devoted to English football’s uniquely tedious interpretation of this year’s opium wars, the latest potholes encountered by José Mourinho on his road to managerial perdition and the apparently interminable hoopla surrounding West Ham’s new digs in east London, it was easy to miss the news that Danny Ings has been sidelined for the rest of the season with another serious injury. Not long back from a long spell out after damaging one knee, the young Liverpool striker suffered the heartbreak of knackering the other last week.
Having gone under the surgeon’s knife in London, now the long and lonely process of recovery begins. In public, the 24-year-old has been making predictably encouraging noises about not giving up and returning stronger, while his manager, team-mates and countless Liverpool fans have offered their unequivocal support at this difficult time. But Ings knows the drill: following the matter-of-fact news stories and that initial flurry of heartfelt sympathy, he will quickly be forgotten, left out of sight and mind among the ranks of football’s invisibles as he deals with the lonely daily grind of recovery and rehabilitation.
Pretty much every football memoir ever written includes a section devoted to a long period in the subject’s career when they were sidelined by injury, and their accounts of the mental, as well as physical, toll these setbacks take invariably make for compelling reading. Confined to a training ground exclusion zone both for practical reasons and the fear they might in some way “contaminate” more fortunate team-mates, they are quickly reduced to the status of nonperson. Some find themselves ignored by managers who, perhaps unwittingly, have little or no interest in acknowledging the existence of a player who is temporarily useless.
Bill Shankly was fabled for the frostiness of the shoulder he used to turn the way of occupants of Liverpool’s treatment room, his thinking being that they would step up their efforts to return to fitness if a working life spent in solitary was the alternative.
In his autobiography, The Artist, Andrés Iniesta provides a harrowing account of what the Barcelona midfielder described as “not depression, exactly, not illness, but an unease” that descended upon him as he struggled to recover from the thigh injury that had previously threatened to keep him out of the 2009 Champions League final, a glorious treble season that should have been a career and life high point. “It grows, the problem snowballs,” he told his collaborators. “You’re not right, not well, but the people around you don’t understand it, because the Andrés they know isn’t this Andrés; they can’t see that somehow you’re empty on the inside. It’s very hard.”
Dealt the subsequent hammer blow of the shock death from a heart attack of his lifelong friend the Espanyol defender Dani Jarque, a vulnerable Iniesta told the Barcelona physiotherapist Emili Ricart he felt he was made of glass. “It was like he thought he would never be right,” said Ricart. “That he would never be fully fit again.” Thank heavens he was wrong.
Made of glass. It is almost identical to the expression Jimmy Bullard used when explaining when exactly it was he became aware the jig was nearly up as far as being a professional footballer was concerned. “Towards the end of my career I felt like a glass ornament out there and whatever happened, I would get injured,” he told me, looking full of uncharacteristic regret. Despite his childish eagerness to elicit giggles on every page of Bend It Like Bullard, he struggles to make light of the desolation he felt during long periods of rehab in the wake of two serious knee injuries. For all that, the image he conjures of himself and fellow invalid Owen Hargreaves forging an unlikely friendship over long hours on adjacent exercise bikes in a Colorado rehab centre does amuse.
Niall Quinn suffered a similar purgatory but at least came out the other side the same, if not a better, player. After contracting septicaemia in the wake of a knee operation he arranged without the permission of his employers at Manchester City, the Irishman almost died and lost so much weight he looked like “a dozen coat hangers stuck inside a sock”. His long road to recovery began with weightlifting sessions, lifting nothing heavier than a sweeping brush. “I hate liver,” he wrote. “I ate kidneys. I ate organs of some sort for breakfast, dinner and tea. I drank shakes that contained 5,000 calories a hit. Early on, I swam. After a while I did football exercises. As often as I could I went to the gym, sometimes three times a day.” Imagine the tedium and ask if it’s any wonder it takes such a psychological toll. “At home I became a bastard to live with,” Quinn adds. “Nobody has ever felt more sorry for himself or self-absorbed.”
For those of us on the outside looking in, the footballer’s lifestyle is enviable. But it is not all beer and skittles. Careers are short and for all their upbeat positivity in the immediate aftermath of calamitous misfortune, Ings and players like him must know they are about to endure a particularly long and special kind of mental hell.
