by Paul Lake
I lay on the pitch in the foetal position, frozen with shock, totally unaware that my life had changed forever.
In a Lonely Place
I WAS CARRIED off the pitch, flanked by physio Roy Bailey and the club doctor, Norman Luft, too dazed and shell-shocked to acknowledge the thousands of upstanding City fans. We headed down the tunnel to the physio room where the doc assessed my knee, swiftly concluding that it was far too swollen for any clear-cut diagnosis.
‘Try to relax, Lakey,’ said Roy. ‘I’ll pack it with ice now, and I’ll have another look at it after the game. We’ll probably know more in the morning, to be honest,’ he added, before grabbing his medical bag and rushing back to his pitch-side duties.
I lay on the treatment table, my leg throbbing, my heart racing and my head swimming with frantic questions. What kind of injury is it? Have I broken something? Is it just a bad twist? What’s Graham Taylor thinking right now? Will he think I’m injury prone? How long will I be out? Just a fortnight? Maybe a month? Please God, don’t let it be the whole season …
Suddenly, a huge roar from the crowd made the whole room vibrate, and seconds later a tannoy announcement proclaimed that City had gone 2–1 up.
‘…and City’s goal scored by number three, Neil Pointon…’
I spent the rest of the game clutching an ice bag to my knee, listening to all the cheers and chants as they filtered through the walls. Once the 90 minutes was up, the City fans celebrated the three points and, as per usual, the club’s ‘Boys in Blue’ anthem blared out of the stadium speakers.
… blue and white they go together
We will carry on for evermore …
My prognosis remained uncertain for several days as I waited patiently for the swelling to subside. I continued to turn up to Maine Road each morning, cadging lifts with my pal Jason, hobbling around the place on crutches and spending hours in the physio room. Following two mind-numbing days spent icing and compressing my knee, things eventually calmed down and I was sent to hospital for an x-ray.
‘You’ll be back around the six-week mark,’ was the reckoning after the results confirmed that there was no bone damage. I was given the impression that, while it was more than just a knock, it certainly wasn’t as serious as everyone had initially feared. I wouldn’t need to see the consultant again, I was told, and an MRI scan of my ligaments and tendons wouldn’t be necessary.
Rob tasked me with a basic rehab programme. Designed to focus on building the strength in my hamstrings and quads, it comprised gentle, stress-limiting exercises alongside some light weight training. Now and then I felt some discomfort in my knee – it gave way on a couple of occasions – but, like most players who didn’t know any better, I assumed that such setbacks were par for the course, and accepted the party line of ‘you’ve obviously got a slight weakness there, Lakey.’
After a month or so I was told that I could have a change of scenery, a welcome development since I was becoming increasingly stir-crazy in the cramped physio room, and was sick of staring at the same four walls. I started training at Maine Road, following a more physically demanding routine that had me jogging around the perimeter of the pitch and hopping up and down the concrete steps of the Kippax terracing. I must have covered every inch of that stand, scaling Rows A to Z and back again, sweating buckets like a poor man’s Rocky Balboa.
I spent my recovery time sitting in one of the wide aisles, resting my knee and sipping from a bottle of water. Sometimes I’d watch as the head groundsman, Stan Gibson, lovingly tended to his pitch, mowing the turf into wide stripes before watering it with the sprinklers. Having been at the club for decades, Stan was almost part of the furniture at Manchester City and lived with his wife, Joyce, in a little house that adjoined the souvenir shop. Short, squat and as strong as an ox, he was one of the most loyal and likeable people at Maine Road, and was held in great affection by players and staff alike.
Despite his onerous workload, Stan always came over for a chat if he spied me up in the gods.
‘How’s that knee of yours feeling today, Lakey?’
‘Not so bad, Stanley, not so bad.’
Sometimes he’d compare my own plight with that of Colin Bell, whose battle for fitness he’d also witnessed at close quarters in the late 1970s. Colin was arguably the best player ever to have worn a City shirt, but his career was blighted and ultimately finished by a knee injury. I remember seeing him in action following his ill-fated comeback, his limping frame a heart-rending sight for all those fans who’d seen ‘Nijinsky’ in his prime.
Our groundsman would get choked up just talking about him.
‘Colin worked like a trooper, just like you,’ he’d say, his weather-worn face flushing with emotion. ‘It broke my heart to see him sat alone in the stands, just like it breaks my heart seeing you sitting here now.’
‘I’ll be all right, don’t worry about me …’
‘Just you keep on going, pal. And even if you come back half the player, you’ll still waltz into that team, y’know that, don’t you?’
‘Thanks, Stan.’
‘And another thing …’
‘What’s that, mate?’
‘Keep off my f***ing grass,’ he’d say, chuckling to himself as he trundled back towards his beloved pitch.
After a month of endless running, I was given the green light to start some proper football work. I was delighted with this, in spite of the fact that orders from the chairman had decreed that I couldn’t rejoin my team-mates at Platt Lane. I wasn’t to be on public display, apparently, and I was told instead to make my way to the Manchester University playing fields to train privately.
At the time I assumed that this closed-door policy was purely for my benefit, minimising distraction and helping me to focus. Looking back, though, I now think there was more to it than met the eye. Many football reporters were closely tracking my progress, and I think there was an element of twitchiness on the club’s part. They were under pressure to return one of its prime assets to full fitness, and didn’t want any setbacks or mishaps to become common knowledge.
It was probably a good job that, apart from the physio, no one saw my knee dramatically give way during that first on-pitch training session. Theoretically, the plan had been for me to move up a gear by attempting some sprinting, passing and tackling. Roy was also keen to work on some twisting and turning, since up until then my exercises had largely involved running up and down in straight lines.
The reality was very different, however. My knee was unable to withstand a short burst of weaving in and out of cones, and it collapsed beneath me. Seeing me lying face-down in the mud was enough for Roy to tell me to go and get changed.
‘Lakey, let’s call it a day. I’m taking you to see the specialist.’
I limped back to the dressing room, my head down and my spirit dented.
The following day I was booked in at a north-west hospital for investigative keyhole surgery (or an arthroscopy, to give it its proper meical name).
‘You’ve ruptured your anterior cruciate ligament,’ explained Roy after he’d spoken to the consultant. The ACL, he told me, was the criss-cross tendon in the knee that acted as a restraint to prevent damage, especially while twisting and turning. He might as well have spoken Swahili as he continued to blind me with science, because all I could think about were those three shattering words:ruptured cruciate ligament. Ruptured cruciate ligament. The injury that all footballers dread. The worst possible outcome.
The forward strategy, I was told, was an innovative but relatively untested technique which would involve the reconstruction of the ligament using a sliver of my own tissue, taken from the patella tendon of the same knee.
‘So what’s the recovery time, then?’ I asked nervously.
‘Well, you probably won’t be playing for another six months, at least,’ sighed Roy, trying to break the news as gently as possible.
Weird as it sounds, I took some solace from this faraway-sounding timeline. After we
eks of uncertainty, a part of me welcomed the clarity of a specific diagnosis. The prospect of major surgery followed by a half-year lay-off wasn’t ideal, of course, but at least now I had a target to aim for. My mind flicked through an imaginary calendar. December, January, February, March, April, May. If I play my cards right I could be fit by June, I thought. Get through pre-season unscathed and I might even be in the starting line-up come August. I reckoned I could live with that.
Within weeks, I was wheeled down to theatre in a private hospital, all gowned-up and ready for my big op. As the sleepy-juice was injected I chose not to recite the customary reverse countdown; instead, Bob Brightwell had dared me to reel off ‘they think it’s all over; it is now …’ I got a few strange looks as I lay on the operating table, reciting Kenneth Wolstenholme’s famous words from 1966, getting as far as ‘over’ before drifting into the land of Nod.
A few hours later, I awoke to hear a weird buzzing sound coupled with the odd sensation of someone roughly grabbing my knee. Groggily, I opened my eyes, lifted my head and saw that my leg was encased in a cage-like contraption that was automatically, and painfully, bending my knee up and down (a CPM machine, I later learned, meaning ‘constant passive motion’). It wasn’t the best wake-up call I’ve ever had in my life.
My first physiotherapy session, three days after the operation, involved trying to straighten my leg and raise it off the bed. My head was willing, but my body wasn’t, yet following some mind-over-matter on my part (and some unflagging patience on the physio’s) after a couple of hours I was finally able to achieve some mobility. I continued apace over the next few days, tackling exercises which, basic though they were, represented slow-but-sure progress.
I was discharged after a couple of weeks, but was still required to attend daily out-patient sessions. My self-confidence soared as each mission was completed – walking, then running, then driving – and it was a momentous day when, after two more months of painstaking rehab, I was told that hospital intervention was no longer necessary and that I could return to my club for treatment.
City’s medical team was incredibly short-staffed, however, with one part-time doctor and one physio tasked with overseeing 40 players. Bearing this in mind, the club decided that I should continue the majority of my recovery at the FA’s rehabilitation centre, adhering to a schedule that would entail spending two weeks out of every three at Lilleshall.
Like a sporting version of Fame’s New York School of Performing Arts, but without kids dancing on yellow cabs and singing ‘High Fidelity’, Lilleshall was a hive of activity. Nestled in a leafy corner of north Shropshire, this sprawling former hunting lodge housed the FA’s Centre of Excellence and Medical Education Centre, and acted as the hub for a variety of sporting bodies, including British Gymnastics, National Archery GB and the English Table Tennis Association. Bizarrely enough, the venue also doubled up as a designated training centre for Her Majesty’s prison wardens. No doubt these blokes felt right at home in Lilleshall’s spartan residential blocks; the place wasn’t called the Colditz of professional football for nothing.
I didn’t like leaving Manchester at the best of times, especially when my temporary digs amounted to a small, dingy room with bare walls and fraying carpets. I remember unpacking my bags with a heavy heart on the day of my arrival, emptying out my clothes and toiletries onto an old wooden bed with a mattress that reeked of Dettol. The ensuite, while not of Eastern European standards, was still pretty grim, with an ancient toilet, a mildewy shower and an illuminated mirror that exposed every pimple and pockmark. Seeing the Singing Detective stare back at you as you shaved each morning wasn’t the best way to start your day.
My room’s only saving grace was its ground-floor location, which allowed me the luxury of receiving all four channels on the wall-mounted television. The players on the lower ground floor couldn’t tune into BBC2 and Channel 4 – the Countdown and University Challenge fans were livid – but it was the lads in the basement who had the real bum deal, with TV sets that could only pick up BBC1. Having telly addicts hammering on my door at night (‘let us in, Lakey,Midweek Sport Special’s on …’) became commonplace.
All in all, it wasn’t the ideal environment for someone who needed their spirits lifting. Whenever I was at a loose end – more so at night, when all was quiet – I’d lie on the bed or pace around the room, mulling over my crappy predicament. I’d constantly replay my chequered career in my head, rewinding and pausing, searching for clues and answers, torturing myself with guilt and blame. Why am I so susceptible? Is there something wrong with my build? Did I play too much football as a child? Have I played through the pain barrier too often? Did I rush back too soon after my first injury? Is this all my fault?
I tried my best, though, to hide these innermost thoughts from my family whenever I journeyed back to Manchester. I enjoyed my regular reunions with the Lake clan, yet would dread the subject of ‘our Paul’s knee’ being brought up during Sunday lunch.
‘Are you in much pain, love?’ Mum would ask, her eyes full of concern. ‘I’ve got paracetamol in the cupboard if you need it.’
And then Dad would pose the million-dollar question.
‘You’ll be all right won’t you, son?’ he’d ask, sharpening his knives and carving the roast chicken while Mum dished out the veg. ‘You’re young, you’re fit, there’s no reason why not, eh?’
Not wanting to overly worry my family, I’d try to skirt around the issue. It was something that I would become expert at over time.
‘I’ll get there, Dad, but it might be a little bit longer than I thought,’ I’d say, feigning nonchalance, before quickly changing the topic of conversation.
‘So anyway, Mike, how’s life at Macclesfield? Are those scouts still sniffing about, or what …?’
During one of my visits home, I arranged to meet up with a financial adviser. In the early 1990s the UK was stuck in the mire of recession, with interest rates skyrocketing to 15 per cent. Without any appearance money or win bonuses, my income had almost halved, my bank balance had withered to nothing and I was struggling to afford the £1,000-per-month mortgage on my house in Heaton Mersey. I wasn’t in a position to sell up – property prices had plummeted and I’d have found myself in negative equity – so I had no option but to rent it out to cover the monthly repayments, and use my parents’ place as a base whenever I was training up in Manchester. So now I had another tribulation to add to my growing list. Injured, isolated, frustrated and skint.
I never slept well at Lilleshall, and this wasn’t always as a result of my new money worries. Ever since that fateful Villa game I’d experienced horrendous recurring nightmares, the most terrifying of which involved me lying lifelessly on top of a rubbish tip like a discarded tailor’s dummy. In another scary scenario I would be swimming in an Olympic-sized pool, but never be able to touch the sides because the more I ploughed on through the water, the further the pool’s edges moved away. Not the hardest dreams to psychoanalyse, I imagine.
So vivid were these nightmares that I’d often jolt myself awake, the sweat bucketing off me as a full-blown panic attack took hold. Unable to get back to sleep, I’d cool myself down with a shower before clicking on the Teasmade and sitting in bed, waiting for TV-am to start. When I wasn’t in the mood for a cockney rat puppet or a barmy keep-fit woman, I’d just nurse my cuppa and listen to the dawn chorus that floated in through the tiny rectangular window. Lilleshall’s vast gardens were a haven for wildlife – rabbits, foxes and badgers were a frequent sight – but it was our feathered friends that held the biggest novelty value for me. I was used to the occasional tweeting sparrow or screeching starling in Manchester, but had never heard anything remotely like the stereophonic Shropshire birdsong that greeted me each morning.
Mike Hooper, the Liverpool goalkeeper and fellow Lilleshall inmate, was a keen birdwatcher who never tired of reminding us that we were in a twitcher’s paradise. Whenever he heard an unusual chirrup he would stop in his tracks, even if
it was slap-bang in the middle of a training session.
‘Sshhhh … that’s a lesser-crested house warbler,’ he’d say with a whisper, cupping his ear to listen as the ball flew past him into the top corner.
‘Yeah, and there’s a great tit between the posts,’ was one memorable riposte.
Awaking with the lark meant that I would be famished by breakfast. Luckily, Lilleshall’s legendary English brekkie – a huge platter of crispy bacon, sizzling sausages and poached eggs, daubed liberally with tomato ketchup – dealt with the hunger pangs. The canteen was a meeting point for track-suited people of all ages, shapes and sizes, from the teenage School of Excellence wannabes to the bespectacled, 40-something archers. It was the male and female gymnasts, though – all permanent residents – who raised the bar in terms of attitude and professionalism. They’d always be down for their muesli and grapefruit juice at 7 a.m., bounding past us en route to their strenuous circuit training while we were wolfing down our third round of fried bread.
The gymnasts’ astounding discipline, centred on a punishing six-days-a-week exercise regime, put us footballers to shame. My admiration for these supremely dedicated athletes knew no bounds, especially in light of the absolute pittance they received from their sporting body.
I had to report to my rehab gym at 9 a.m. sharp, Monday to Friday. Meeting me there would be a mixed bag of professional footballers, some from the various Divisions; some with complex injuries, others with more straightforward knocks and strains. The unlucky minority, such as Ian Durrant and myself, were recovering from ligament ruptures and had been sentenced to a long stretch of intensive treatment. Those suffering from less serious problems, like Vinnie Jones and Ally McCoist, were parachuted into Shropshire for much shorter stints.
Durrant, the Rangers midfielder, was a lad I got to know quite well. Our similar injuries and long-term rehab meant that we had to spend a large chunk of time together and, with his brilliant training attitude and infectious enthusiasm, I couldn’t have wished for a better companion to spur me on. Ian also possessed a caustic sense of humour, and would often upset the more sensitive souls in the camp by overdramatising their injuries.