Adam Forshaw’s 697 days of agony and why he can finally now look forward to his Premier League dream - The Athletic 25/8/21
By Phil Hay
Adam Forshaw is the player at Leeds United who runs the
morning quiz in the medical room. His team-mates lie on the loungers, receiving
treatment before training, and Forshaw keeps them occupied by testing their
football knowledge.
The squad like the distraction, and everyone likes Forshaw,
but there is only so long a non-playing footballer can serve as the
entertainment. David Prutton once recalled how his decision to leave Leeds was
rubber-stamped by the club’s stadium announcer asking him to take to the pitch
at half-time during a League One match. He was struggling to get a game or even
make the squad, so why not entertain the crowd?
‘Fuck me,’ Prutton thought to himself. Is this what it’s
come to? Acting like a jester? He refused to do it and a few weeks later,
joined Colchester United and said goodbye. Better that than outstaying your
welcome.
Forshaw’s circumstances are different to Prutton’s back
then. Prutton was a victim of the pecking order, a footballer Leeds no longer
needed. Forshaw is the player who shone most brightly during Marcelo Bielsa’s
first pre-season; a cog Bielsa would still like in his machine. A broken foot
that summer, suffered innocuously in training, was merely a precursor to what
came next.
The last time anyone saw Forshaw kick a ball in anger, Leeds
were still the best part of a year from promotion from the Championship.
But last night, at home to third division Crewe Alexandra in
the Carabao Cup, the light at the end of the tunnel met him; a run of 21 months
without a first-team appearance ending with a game unlike anything he expected.
It was always likely that Forshaw would play against Crewe, a less
consequential fixture than any Leeds are contesting in the Premier League and a
gentle starter, but starvation caused by 18 months without crowds meant Elland
Road was rammed to capacity for it.
The timeline of his most debilitating injury is a grim one,
running back to a game against Derby County, which he missed in September 2019.
Forshaw would be back the next week, Bielsa predicted, and Forshaw was, for a
1-0 defeat at Charlton Athletic. That bone in his foot had long since healed
and the only consequence of it was the quality of Bielsa’s midfield in his
absence, particularly Mateusz Klich, meant Forshaw could not find a quick way
back in. But in the days after that trip to Charlton the longer road began,
much as no one at Elland Road expected him to be missing for any severe length
of time.
As weeks turned into months, it became a personal mission for
the club’s medical staff to get him through the other side of almost two years
of torment.
The discomfort Forshaw suffered from was caused by bones in
his groin/hip area rubbing together. It was unsurprisingly painful, sometimes
in a way that was almost manageable but often to an extent that made it
impossible for him to train fully. Leeds resisted surgery for a while because
that would mean a long absence and something about the injury made the club
optimistic that physio work might see it off. Bielsa was quoted repeatedly as
saying Forshaw was not too far away. Everyone believed it, Forshaw included.
But at no stage was he ever right.
As the delay went on, Leeds accepted the need for more
serious treatment. Forshaw underwent major surgery at the Steadman Clinic in
Colorado, USA — a renowned facility which had treated other footballers,
including Michael Owen and Owen Hargreaves, as well as a host of top American
sports figures. He went to specialists in Ireland and elsewhere. He had teeth
removed in the hope that losing them might aid his skeletal structure (Leeds
had invested in dentistry treatment after Bielsa’s arrival, primarily because
of the link between the health of one’s teeth and the health of the rest of the
body). That trip to the Steadman Clinic took place early last year and
ultimately worked but muscles which had gone without competitive football for
months took longer to reacclimatise, susceptible to niggles and minor setbacks.
Last season, during a Premier League campaign in which
Forshaw did not feature at all, he was used in an under-23s fixture for the
first time, a friendly against York City. He then pulled a hamstring and, with
the end of the season approaching, Leeds decided to leave him be until they
reconvened to begin training for 2021-22. It might have been possible to get
him fit for the final first-team match against West Bromwich Albion — a dead
rubber and a farewell to Pablo Hernandez, Gaetano Berardi and Gjanni Alioski —
but after almost two years out, what were another couple of months? A healthy
summer saw to it that Forshaw made the bench for the first game of this season
10 days ago, away at Manchester United.
The mental impact of his slow recovery is easy enough to
imagine. Forshaw, now 30, made his professional debut for Everton as an
18-year-old and has been in a first-team environment for longer than he can
remember. He featured in the second series of Amazon Prime’s Take Us Home documentary,
watching on television at home as Bielsa and Leeds tried to wrap up Premier
League promotion. After a friendly at Guiseley last month, Forshaw was pictured
sharing a moment with his young son beside the pitch. “My son won’t remember
watching me before my two years of hell,” Forshaw wrote on Instagram. Which is
how it must have been.
The irony of being an injured footballer is that no one
spends more time at the training ground than them. But, over time, they become
increasingly anonymous, invisible and forgotten, at least to the public.
Bielsa likes to talk Forshaw up. He has been heard in
private to say that he thinks Forshaw, in top form and full fitness, would do a
job for a Champions League club’s midfield and remarked last week that he
possesses quality “we couldn’t buy in the market at this moment”. But for so
long there was no point in making comments like that, not in the absence of any
firm predictions about when Forshaw would actually play.
Whenever you asked about him, Erik Lamela’s name was
sometimes referenced. Lamela, then at Tottenham Hotspur, required hip surgery
in 2017 and was out for more than a year. His absence was shorter than
Forshaw’s but nonetheless, his experience proved that hip problems can take
time to recover from and that a long period of rehabilitation need not be an
obstacle to a comeback.
Forshaw got there last night, grinning and walking on air as
he came out for the warm-up. Sixty minutes against Crewe was a small step and a
huge step, both in the right direction.
Between this appearance and his last? Six hundred and
ninety-seven days. The ultimate medical room tie-breaker.
