… I always enjoyed playing under floodlights and there was a tremendous atmosphere as we ran out and prepared to get underway. Within a minute we were ahead, with Dennis Tueart scoring the goal, United were rattled as we pressed forward for a second goal. I received a pass through the centre circle from Dennis.
I was in the old fashioned inside right position as I made my way towards United’s goal at the Platt Lane end of the ground, I’d run about ten to fifteen yards into space, as things opened up for me because the United players had been drawn towards Dennis. I had a bit of space in front of me and I was preparing to shoot.
Paddy Roche was in goal and the pitch was a bit bobbly, as many surfaces were at that time of year. In the back of my mind I was thinking that I might have a shot, as Paddy wasn’t the best of goalkeepers. At that stage, I didn’t really feel I had much of a choice, apart from having a crack at goal. Out of the corner of my eye I saw a player coming across in front of me and I decided I had three options. I picked the wrong one.
The first option was to take a shot, if the ball sat up in the right position. The second was to increase my forward pace and try to go away from the player. The third choice was to stop, drag the ball back, let him go across me and then I’d go on clear, towards goal. I selected the last one.
I dragged it back, which left me balanced on my right leg, with all six studs in the ground. I could now see that it was Martin Buchan who was challenging me. His tackled smacked me just below the knee, in the right leg, which had my full weight on it.
It felt like my leg had been screwed into the ground. My knee bent backwards bursting blood vessels in the bottom of my thigh and in the top of my calf. All the ligaments in my knee were torn. Within seconds the knee was just a bag of blood. I knew straight away that it was a bad injury.
It wasn’t the pain that bothered me the most as I was being carried off by our physio Freddie Griffiths and his assistant Roy Bailey, it was fearing how bad the injury was. I shouted up to Freddie, “They’ve friggin hurt me Fred”. Within 30 seconds my knee had swollen to the size of a football.
Very soon I was in an ambulance on the way to hospital, where I was to stay for several days. My leg was black and blue from the hip joint right down to my ankle, I was quite generally unwell too, not just from the injury but also the shock to my system. I was told by the doctors that the trauma was similar to that suffered by someone involved in a serious car crash.
… Perhaps with today’s surgical techniques my treatment would have been different, but that kind of expertise simply didn’t exist at the time.
The first operation I had was to remove the congealed blood . After surgery, they immobilised my leg, which in hindsight was probably a mistake.
I believe that if I’d kept bending the leg and been able to mobilise at an earlier stage it would have helped the healing process. To have it in a straight legged position meant everything just congealed even more inside the knee. It was as if the joint had been super glued. When the plaster was eventually removed, I couldn’t even bend my knee.