Shaw’s journey back

With Manchester United’s Luke Shaw on the brink of a return from a broken leg, former Nottingham Forest left-back Gregor Robertson shares his experiences of recovering from such an injury, including the physical and mental challenges that the England international will have faced…

I don’t think I’ll ever forget the feeling that night. It wasn’t so much the pain, it was the shock: a jolting trauma I’d never experienced on a football pitch, and an almost instant fear for the future.

It was an innocuous-looking tackle. My outstretched leg planted in the ground, the force of his sliding challenge too great for it to bear, and snap – what sounded like a shin pad breaking was my tibia and fibula giving way beneath me.

I screamed and reached out a hand for help. But when my team-mates came closer, many turned away the second their eyes caught sight of my leg, lying there on the grass, pointing in an unnatural direction. I couldn’t see it, and I didn’t want to, either. But I knew.

As I lay in the middle of the pitch at Saltergate, Chesterfield’s rusty old corrugated-iron stadium, body crumpled forward, scared to move an inch, my head began to whirl with a surreal, slow-motion, almost outer-body sense of dismay – the type you get when you question whether something is really happening to you at all.

As the oxygen arrived, and reality returned, my heart sunk and tears filled my eyes as I contemplated the impact one jarring moment was going to have on my career – and my life.

Since that night, whenever I see or hear of that injury happening to another player, knowing just how it feels, and what lies in store for them, I get a little shiver of sympathy and regret.

Watching fellow left-back Luke Shaw break his leg in September last year was no different. But news of his return to training last week, not even seven months since the event – encouraging as it is – was something I met with more than a little caution.

Immediately the question of when he will return to first-team action arose. After all, Manchester United could do with his services and – with the European Championship looming large on the horizon – England would very much like to have him fit and available for selection, too.

Getting out onto the grass after six months stuck in a gym or swimming pool is a huge landmark, even if he is still working with the physios. But he still has a very long way to go.

On my first day outside in the fresh air and sunshine, seven months after my leg break in 2009, as I …

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