Professional sports people can often seem a little remote. Partly this is because so many of them live a closeted life, sealed within the elite fur-lined helicopter gunship of professional sport-dom. Partly it’s because in their active lives they are often just very different human machines. They work differently, move differently, have about them the physical thoroughbred’s self-possession. Most people have a story about playing at some point against the guy who became the guy, the familiar revelation of basic species-difference between those who play for fun and those who can do it with the best.
This only gets worse as you get older. A few years ago I played football against a team containing the recently retired Robert Pires, an experience that was like trying to keep pace with a very neat, slender, well-groomed ghost. Without seeming to move much Pires was simply gone, there but not there, teleporting about in his own bespoke pocket of space while the rest of us engaged the reverse thrusters and parped our foghorns, rotating in his general direction like steam ships creeping through an iceberg field.
The best players are different, then. Except, of course, when they’re suddenly not, as was the case for all the wrong reasons on Tuesday when Luke Shaw suffered his horrendous injury, a double fracture of the right leg that has left him confined still to the St Anna Ziekenhuis hospital near Eindhoven. For those on the outside it was a terrible thing to witness, even at one remove, a moment where sport and teams and colours simply fall away, replaced by a helpless, painful tenderness at seeing him suffer such agony and shock.
As usual the internet was immediately drenched with the familiar rash of injury porn – clips, vines, gifs, hot takes – each repetition a little more uncomfortable, a little more queasy-making. Particularly, perhaps, if like me you are one of the many people out there who have also had a serious leg injury. As a teenager I tore all the ligaments in my knee, an injury that left my leg wrenched briefly around the wrong way and which I can still feel now and then when it’s cold. With this kind of thing you never really forget the moment. First comes the shock of impact, that ungodly snap, crack and pop, and the sense immediately of something very, very wrong.
After which, if you’re really unlucky, comes the unique transgressive thrill of looking down to see your leg, yes that old friend, facing the wrong way, realigned at some bizarre, mocking new angle. For an instant there’s a stab of mild fascination. You want to point at it, to grab someone and tell them. Look. What. Hey. Then it all just turns to pain, or rather a flush of heat, panic, grief, a kind of internal scream, your body simply unable to exist in this space any longer.
Like many others, all those whose leg has at some point in its life flapped and waggled and turned to face you suddenly – Hi there! – in defiance of the standard laws of human hinges, I tend to shiver and blanch at injuries like these, feeling just a fraternal urge to try, somehow, to take a bit of the pain away, to say, “Look, this weird, terrible thing will right itself in the end.”
As it should with any luck. The 20-year-old’s recovery will be state of the art, minutely supervised, and given a nudge along by much shared goodwill for a high-class, genuinely likable footballer. All terrible injuries are of course equally terrible but there is something particularly affecting about seeing this happen to a player this age, with this kind of talent, at this stage in his career. It had been a brilliant few weeks for Shaw, who is now established as first choice for Manchester United, a fearless, attack-minded, modern kind of full-back who just looks like he was made to win things. He can be thrillingly assertive, pushing high up his flank – propelled by that prodigious rump – and with the skill and drive to make exactly the kind of barrelling run that ended in injury on Tuesday.
That hard-running style is perhaps a relevant point here too. There do seem to be more of these type of injuries now. There is no available data to support this feeling, just a sense that in the past players would suffer more cuts, more impact injuries. Whereas Shaw’s break, like several others that spring to mind, was more of a motion injury, a case of a player having his progress interrupted suddenly and his whole weight coming to bear at once on one limb , a terrible triangulation of stopped momentum, collision with an opponent and a leg that stays anchored in the ground.
It isn’t hard to see why this might happen a little more now. Players run faster for longer, no slower in the 90th minute than they were in the first. If football is played at a slower pace overall, or with more lulls in matches, these concussive, high-speed leg injuries will surely happen less. Whereas in the modern game of sprints it seems logical they will happen more, just as many of the players who have suffered are dynamic players, injured the same way Shaw was, hurtling through a crowd of players, daring the opposition to make contact.
It’s not clear what, if anything, can be done about this. In rugby or some martial arts players are trained to fall better, to roll instantly with the contact. It seems unlikely this would work in football, but perhaps it might be coached at some stage. Similarly there is some hard evidence shorter studs reduce the risk of injury, offering less opportunity for the leg to become fixed under stress.
For now, though, if Shaw needs inspiration he might look at others who have come back strongly. Antonio Valencia was out for six months with a double break but returned to play in the Champions League final. Eight months after suffering his, Henrik Larsson played at Euro 2000. Even Paul Gascoigne, who at the same stage as Shaw is at now was being wheeled through Heathrow under a blanket while cameramen fought over his prone form, managed to recover from a double break in a challenge with Lazio’s then youth‑team player Alessandro Nesta.
What is certain is Shaw will face several stages of agony and frustration. After the throbbing background comes the long, depressing mid-period; the sight of your own atrophied leg removed from its cast, yellowed and skinny and horrible; and then the everyday grind of rehab, the setbacks, the stalled progress. Shaw is young enough to draw a veil over this, to bury the memory – as it deserves to be – and regain that boldness and strength. The goal seems simple enough. Get well slowly. Get strong. Start next season. Win again. Don’t look back.
