Super Graham Withey
Well-Known Member
In Valletta, Malta in a pub watching Jodi Jones starting for Malta away in Estonia.
Ex Player Watch (35 Viewers)
- Thread starter ccfcway
- Start date
ProfessorbyGrace
Well-Known Member
How’s he getting on?
I always hoped JJ would have a monster peak in ability whilst here at City, but those injuries just wrecked him.
I always hoped JJ would have a monster peak in ability whilst here at City, but those injuries just wrecked him.
AStonesThrow
Well-Known Member
Subbed at half time
SlowerThanPlatt
Well-Known Member
Pretend it never happened and see if San Marino need any players?
ProfessorbyGrace
Well-Known Member
AStonesThrow
Well-Known Member
Not sure, haven’t been watching but saw it on Flashscore. Shame for the lad really cos could have been his big chance
AStonesThrow
Well-Known Member
just looked into it and was tactical, looks like he was being played up front or just behind, and got subbed off for a defender as they were down to 10 men
Sky Blue Harry H
Well-Known Member
Northampton v Stockport on Sky (going to have a look and see if Lee Buuuuuuurge is starting!
skybluegod
Well-Known Member
Bayliss and Shipley both with assists today for Shrewsbury. Bayliss played a great ball to Shipley for his assist as well.
fernandopartridge
Well-Known Member
Just saw it on the highlights, superb and shows what Bayliss can do
Sent from my SM-G935F using Tapatalk
Sky Blue Harry H
Well-Known Member
I did wonder last night, if worse came to the worse and we did drop next year, whether we should be looking at him again. We're probably going to have to buy/loan at least 3 new cbs next summer too, as well as big 3 replacements, whichever division we're in. There's going to be massive turnover in players.
Esoterica
Well-Known Member
I think Bayliss will have a good couple of seasons in League 1 and step back up to the Championship. He just needs an arm around his shoulder so he regains some belief and confidence and then plenty of playing time in his correct position. Preston was a ridiculous move for him, football wise, on many levels.
Personally would have been more than happy to have him back this season as a much cheaper option than Palmer, freeing up wages for a defender (little bit of hindsight there I admit) and think he'd be much more creative in the O'Hare role than Allen has been. That said, I think the drop down to L1 will do him more good in the long term.
WestEndAgro
Well-Known Member
Clarke Harris with another brace.
PUSB-We_are_going_up
Well-Known Member
Third try’s the charm?
Sky Blue Harry H
Well-Known Member
Yep, although he was a little unfortunate in that particular incident. A few recent higher level players knocking around at 'small' teams now. Danny Hilton - Northampton. Jamal Blackman was in goal for Exeter, and that Rakheem Harper we were linked with playing in the Exeter team. That Nombe who scored, was also touted by a few (previously MK Dons).
Moff
Well-Known Member
I agree he was a little unfortunate for the penalty, he just didn’t see the attacker as he was trying to clear.
I was surprised at FGR, I know they lost their manager but seeing some of their game yesterday they were very off form.
better days
Well-Known Member
I watched the game
He was never going to play a full 90 minutes against Estonia as he's played so few minutes at Oxford this season
But the manager had to bring on a central defender after Borg was harshly sent off when conceding a contentious penalty in time added on at the end of the first half
Jones was the player sacrificed
He's due a change of luck
Malta have Israel on Tuesday
Sky Blue Harry H
Well-Known Member
Just tuned into watch Conor Chaplin - Plymouth v Ipswich.
Commentator starts with 'sun is shining at Fratton Park' ?!?!?!?! Don't think it's Clive doing the commentary.
Commentator starts with 'sun is shining at Fratton Park' ?!?!?!?! Don't think it's Clive doing the commentary.
Terry_dactyl
Well-Known Member
Perhaps the sun IS shining at fratton park?
GaryMabbuttsLeftKnee
Well-Known Member
Bayliss and Shipley with the goals for Coventry B
Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
wantageskyblue
Well-Known Member
Jacob Murphy playing regularly @ Newcastle and scored today - not bad for someone deemed to be lazy when here.
SlowerThanPlatt
Well-Known Member
Sure he’s only started something like 5 games in a year mostly down when there’s injuries but fair play all the same
D
Deleted member 9744
Guest
8 appearances this season 33 last season. I thought he was a really good player for us.
SlowerThanPlatt
Well-Known Member
Long but worthwhile read:
David Busst is not a religious man so when the chaplain came to see him he felt, not comfort, but concern. Then one of the medics gave it to him straight. He was told that he would wake up from the operation either lying in bed . . . or in an oxygen tent. The tent would have meant that they had amputated his leg.
“That was the scariest moment and I remember waking up, seeing nothing around me and thinking, ‘Something has gone well . . .’ and then looking down the bed, ‘Yeah, still got two.’ ”
The phlegmatic way in which the 55-year-old tells his tale typifies Busst, who could have become one of English football’s saddest stories but has instead traced a journey of resilience and rebirth. Not that he agrees when I say that he’s inspiring. “I don’t see it like that. Mental health is massive but the way I was as a player, when I got injured I naively went on with positivity. ‘This has happened — what’s the next step?’ ” Busst says.
“That’s just how I saw things. Not, ‘Can I play again?’ but, ‘Can I walk again?’ Then, ‘Can I jog?’ ‘Can I kick a ball?’ The little steps.
“When people ask me to talk about mental health, they think, ‘Great, we’re going to get the dark days,’ and instead get positivity. I tell them, ‘I’m probably not the best person.’ ”
We’re at Coventry City’s academy, where Busst has turned up expecting to oversee a couple of sessions for local schoolchildren but instead — to his embarrassment — has found there is a plinth, a plaque, gathered colleagues and a delegation from the Premier League who have come to present him with an award.
As part of the Premier League’s 30th anniversary celebrations, it is honouring “community captains” — unsung heroes, nominated by clubs, who have shown unparalleled commitment to community work. Busst, head of Sky Blues in the Community (SBitC), and an unstinting leader of Coventry’s community work for 25 years, accepts shyly a special armband.
“Now what — do I wear it?” he jokes in his Brummie drawl, keen to puncture any sense of ceremony. “It’s nice to be recognised,” he adds later. “But let’s get on with tomorrow and today.”
What Busst would really like to talk about is other people; the staff, volunteers and beneficiaries of SBitC’s programmes, which include Premier League Kicks and Premier League Stars — funded to the tune of £200,000 by the Premier League, even though it is 21 years since Coventry were in the top flight.
He wants to talk about Ron, who joined a walking football group for over-60s set up to combat isolation and through that took part in a cancer screening scheme, had prostate cancer diagnosed, beat it, and has now done more than 1,000 hours of volunteering for Coventry’s cancer support group — despite having a stroke.
Or Dave, who from childhood had suffered bullying and got to the point — in his 30s — where he was reclusive, suffering PTSD and manic depressions. He lost four stone through Coventry’s fit fans programme and now works as one of the club’s community mentors. “His story,” says Busst, “just blows you away.”
But, of course, I want to talk about the same thing everyone else does, the thing people have asked Busst about for 26 years, and I can’t help noting his limp. For Busst suffered what still seems the grisliest, most distressing, injury in Premier League history — one that, even now, is hard to view pictures of without looking away.
It happened 87 seconds into Manchester United v Coventry, at Old Trafford, on April 8, 1996. Coventry had a corner and worked a favourite routine. Ally Pickering flicked on at the near post and Busst, Coventry’s strapping, blond centre half arrived on cue.
He made contact with the ball (“Should have scored, son,” quipped his manager, Ron Atkinson, when he visited Busst in hospital) but as Busst stretched, Brian McClair arrived from his right and Denis Irwin from his left and in the freak collision Busst’s right leg buckled, his tibia and fibula splintering, with bits of bone breaking through his skin. The image of Busst’s shin making an L-shape as it jammed and caved in on the turf is so gruesome as to barely seem real.
“At the time you just freeze. The pain’s immense. It’s not going away. Shock sets in,” Busst says. He can describe the moment exactly because he didn’t black out. Peter Schmeichel, Manchester United’s goalkeeper that day, still remembers Busst’s screams and the pool of blood in his goalmouth, which had to be mopped away. Dion Dublin knelt with Busst and held his hand until he left on a stretcher, to be taken to hospital.
He had suffered compound spiral fractures of the tibia and fibula and underwent ten operations over the next 12 days, including a fasciotomy — there was no blood supply to the open wound so the back of his calf was peeled off and twisted 45 degrees to enable blood flow to the bone. He had two surgeons, an orthopaedic surgeon for the break and a plastic surgeon to repair the damage.
They pinned his bones together but he developed a severe haematoma on his muscle, which burst. Then he contracted MRSA, the “superbug” that is resistant to antibiotics and kills hundreds every year. Amputation was on the cards if bacteria had come too far, and though Busst’s leg survived, he was left with destroyed muscle and tissue.
“They had to remove four [damaged] tendons in my foot, leaving me one, [inside] the big toe,” he says. “Two years down the line I had another op to pull that tendon tight. I do have dropped foot now — I can’t pull my toes up. But that was an important operation because it pulled [the foot] up to a level where I could start walking.”
In all, Busst had 24 operations. The day after the game, Schmeichel and Eric Cantona tried visiting him but were turned away, because he was in a special unit, but over the six weeks he remained in hospital, other players came to see him, including Steve Bruce and Ryan Giggs.
At weekends Busst was allowed out to see his family and spent these in the Copthorne Hotel near Old Trafford. “One day reception rang and said there was a Man United fan who wanted to have a photograph with me. This young lad appeared, wearing a cap. I looked at him and said, ‘I’m really sorry, but you’re David Beckham, aren’t you?”
“‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Can you sign this ‘To David,’ ” Busst recalls.
It was on one of these weekends at the Copthorne that he saw pictures of his moment of injury for the first time. “There was a copy of the Daily Mirror and my mum had cut out the page — she was trying to hide it from me — but as I picked up the paper the page fell out. I looked and thought, ‘Wow.’ ” Typically, the impact of the injury on his family is what Busst focuses on.
“I remember waking up from one of the operations and seeing my dad sat beside me.
He looked so drawn. My parents were in the ground that day and saw how severe it was, then had to see all the pictures.
“It’s a bit sad because all the attention was on me, but there was the effect on my wife and daughter. My daughter was ten at the time. Nobody thought about what they were going through. And my lad — he never played football. He’s 6ft 9in and rugby is his game. He never knew me as a footballer. It was while I was in hospital that my wife told me she was three months pregnant with him.”
He retired as a player in November 1996, having accepted he would never regain the mobility required for top-level football. “I tried to rehab and went for a couple of weeks but then said to the [Coventry] physio, ‘I shouldn’t be here. I’m a reminder to every player of what can happen.’ ”
After a testimonial at Old Trafford in May 1997, Busst joined Coventry’s community department. At the same time he qualified as a coach but, after a few years managing in non-League football, decided to focus full-time on community work.
He still plays, in a regular six-a-side game with friends. He really does seem positive, happy, and living a regret-free life.
“I was late coming into [professional] football,” he shrugs. “I was 24 when I signed for Coventry and 29 when I retired. From 16, I worked for Britannic Assurance in Birmingham, where my dad was personnel manager and my mum, sister and brother had jobs. I played for the works team and then for Kings Heath and Moor Green in the Midlands comp.
When I signed for Coventry I was on less money than I made at Britannic for selling mortgages and pensions.
“When it was all taken away, I could handle it because I had never planned my life around being a professional footballer. And I guess I just have a positivity that I probably get from my mother, who’s a mad Irish lady.
“My injury? I always felt the positive was that I broke my leg at Old Trafford and not a small stadium [with less medical provision] in a reserve game. It does get in the way sometimes, because you might be at an event where you’re trying to grow the community [department] and have the chance to network with different partners and not talk about football — and then people want to talk about the injury. But at other times, it’s the thing that opens doors.”
Schmeichel’s view of that leg break
David Busst’s injury was horrific. I had to walk away. I could not take it. The poor guy was on the floor in the most terrible pain.
That was the day I fell in love with Dion Dublin. While the rest of us shrank away, Dion sat with Busst and held his hand, calming him down. It takes some person to do that. The referee, Dermot Gallagher, handled the situation superbly too.
The game stopped for nine minutes while Busst received treatment. There was a pool of blood in my goalmouth, in front of the post. Gallagher was about to restart when I looked at the blood on the grass. I waved. ‘Ref, I can’t play with that’. He understood. They brought on someone with sand and cleared the blood away.
www.thetimes.co.uk
David Busst is not a religious man so when the chaplain came to see him he felt, not comfort, but concern. Then one of the medics gave it to him straight. He was told that he would wake up from the operation either lying in bed . . . or in an oxygen tent. The tent would have meant that they had amputated his leg.
“That was the scariest moment and I remember waking up, seeing nothing around me and thinking, ‘Something has gone well . . .’ and then looking down the bed, ‘Yeah, still got two.’ ”
The phlegmatic way in which the 55-year-old tells his tale typifies Busst, who could have become one of English football’s saddest stories but has instead traced a journey of resilience and rebirth. Not that he agrees when I say that he’s inspiring. “I don’t see it like that. Mental health is massive but the way I was as a player, when I got injured I naively went on with positivity. ‘This has happened — what’s the next step?’ ” Busst says.
“That’s just how I saw things. Not, ‘Can I play again?’ but, ‘Can I walk again?’ Then, ‘Can I jog?’ ‘Can I kick a ball?’ The little steps.
“When people ask me to talk about mental health, they think, ‘Great, we’re going to get the dark days,’ and instead get positivity. I tell them, ‘I’m probably not the best person.’ ”
We’re at Coventry City’s academy, where Busst has turned up expecting to oversee a couple of sessions for local schoolchildren but instead — to his embarrassment — has found there is a plinth, a plaque, gathered colleagues and a delegation from the Premier League who have come to present him with an award.
As part of the Premier League’s 30th anniversary celebrations, it is honouring “community captains” — unsung heroes, nominated by clubs, who have shown unparalleled commitment to community work. Busst, head of Sky Blues in the Community (SBitC), and an unstinting leader of Coventry’s community work for 25 years, accepts shyly a special armband.
“Now what — do I wear it?” he jokes in his Brummie drawl, keen to puncture any sense of ceremony. “It’s nice to be recognised,” he adds later. “But let’s get on with tomorrow and today.”
What Busst would really like to talk about is other people; the staff, volunteers and beneficiaries of SBitC’s programmes, which include Premier League Kicks and Premier League Stars — funded to the tune of £200,000 by the Premier League, even though it is 21 years since Coventry were in the top flight.
He wants to talk about Ron, who joined a walking football group for over-60s set up to combat isolation and through that took part in a cancer screening scheme, had prostate cancer diagnosed, beat it, and has now done more than 1,000 hours of volunteering for Coventry’s cancer support group — despite having a stroke.
Or Dave, who from childhood had suffered bullying and got to the point — in his 30s — where he was reclusive, suffering PTSD and manic depressions. He lost four stone through Coventry’s fit fans programme and now works as one of the club’s community mentors. “His story,” says Busst, “just blows you away.”
But, of course, I want to talk about the same thing everyone else does, the thing people have asked Busst about for 26 years, and I can’t help noting his limp. For Busst suffered what still seems the grisliest, most distressing, injury in Premier League history — one that, even now, is hard to view pictures of without looking away.
It happened 87 seconds into Manchester United v Coventry, at Old Trafford, on April 8, 1996. Coventry had a corner and worked a favourite routine. Ally Pickering flicked on at the near post and Busst, Coventry’s strapping, blond centre half arrived on cue.
He made contact with the ball (“Should have scored, son,” quipped his manager, Ron Atkinson, when he visited Busst in hospital) but as Busst stretched, Brian McClair arrived from his right and Denis Irwin from his left and in the freak collision Busst’s right leg buckled, his tibia and fibula splintering, with bits of bone breaking through his skin. The image of Busst’s shin making an L-shape as it jammed and caved in on the turf is so gruesome as to barely seem real.
“At the time you just freeze. The pain’s immense. It’s not going away. Shock sets in,” Busst says. He can describe the moment exactly because he didn’t black out. Peter Schmeichel, Manchester United’s goalkeeper that day, still remembers Busst’s screams and the pool of blood in his goalmouth, which had to be mopped away. Dion Dublin knelt with Busst and held his hand until he left on a stretcher, to be taken to hospital.
He had suffered compound spiral fractures of the tibia and fibula and underwent ten operations over the next 12 days, including a fasciotomy — there was no blood supply to the open wound so the back of his calf was peeled off and twisted 45 degrees to enable blood flow to the bone. He had two surgeons, an orthopaedic surgeon for the break and a plastic surgeon to repair the damage.
They pinned his bones together but he developed a severe haematoma on his muscle, which burst. Then he contracted MRSA, the “superbug” that is resistant to antibiotics and kills hundreds every year. Amputation was on the cards if bacteria had come too far, and though Busst’s leg survived, he was left with destroyed muscle and tissue.
“They had to remove four [damaged] tendons in my foot, leaving me one, [inside] the big toe,” he says. “Two years down the line I had another op to pull that tendon tight. I do have dropped foot now — I can’t pull my toes up. But that was an important operation because it pulled [the foot] up to a level where I could start walking.”
In all, Busst had 24 operations. The day after the game, Schmeichel and Eric Cantona tried visiting him but were turned away, because he was in a special unit, but over the six weeks he remained in hospital, other players came to see him, including Steve Bruce and Ryan Giggs.
At weekends Busst was allowed out to see his family and spent these in the Copthorne Hotel near Old Trafford. “One day reception rang and said there was a Man United fan who wanted to have a photograph with me. This young lad appeared, wearing a cap. I looked at him and said, ‘I’m really sorry, but you’re David Beckham, aren’t you?”
“‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Can you sign this ‘To David,’ ” Busst recalls.
It was on one of these weekends at the Copthorne that he saw pictures of his moment of injury for the first time. “There was a copy of the Daily Mirror and my mum had cut out the page — she was trying to hide it from me — but as I picked up the paper the page fell out. I looked and thought, ‘Wow.’ ” Typically, the impact of the injury on his family is what Busst focuses on.
“I remember waking up from one of the operations and seeing my dad sat beside me.
He looked so drawn. My parents were in the ground that day and saw how severe it was, then had to see all the pictures.
“It’s a bit sad because all the attention was on me, but there was the effect on my wife and daughter. My daughter was ten at the time. Nobody thought about what they were going through. And my lad — he never played football. He’s 6ft 9in and rugby is his game. He never knew me as a footballer. It was while I was in hospital that my wife told me she was three months pregnant with him.”
He retired as a player in November 1996, having accepted he would never regain the mobility required for top-level football. “I tried to rehab and went for a couple of weeks but then said to the [Coventry] physio, ‘I shouldn’t be here. I’m a reminder to every player of what can happen.’ ”
After a testimonial at Old Trafford in May 1997, Busst joined Coventry’s community department. At the same time he qualified as a coach but, after a few years managing in non-League football, decided to focus full-time on community work.
He still plays, in a regular six-a-side game with friends. He really does seem positive, happy, and living a regret-free life.
“I was late coming into [professional] football,” he shrugs. “I was 24 when I signed for Coventry and 29 when I retired. From 16, I worked for Britannic Assurance in Birmingham, where my dad was personnel manager and my mum, sister and brother had jobs. I played for the works team and then for Kings Heath and Moor Green in the Midlands comp.
When I signed for Coventry I was on less money than I made at Britannic for selling mortgages and pensions.
“When it was all taken away, I could handle it because I had never planned my life around being a professional footballer. And I guess I just have a positivity that I probably get from my mother, who’s a mad Irish lady.
“My injury? I always felt the positive was that I broke my leg at Old Trafford and not a small stadium [with less medical provision] in a reserve game. It does get in the way sometimes, because you might be at an event where you’re trying to grow the community [department] and have the chance to network with different partners and not talk about football — and then people want to talk about the injury. But at other times, it’s the thing that opens doors.”
Schmeichel’s view of that leg break
David Busst’s injury was horrific. I had to walk away. I could not take it. The poor guy was on the floor in the most terrible pain.
That was the day I fell in love with Dion Dublin. While the rest of us shrank away, Dion sat with Busst and held his hand, calming him down. It takes some person to do that. The referee, Dermot Gallagher, handled the situation superbly too.
The game stopped for nine minutes while Busst received treatment. There was a pool of blood in my goalmouth, in front of the post. Gallagher was about to restart when I looked at the blood on the grass. I waved. ‘Ref, I can’t play with that’. He understood. They brought on someone with sand and cleared the blood away.
David Busst: I was just glad I still had two legs – I didn’t know if I’d ever walk again
David Busst is not a religious man so when the chaplain came to see him he felt, not comfort, but concern. Then one of the medics gave it to him straight. He wa
www.thetimes.co.uk
ovduk78
Well-Known Member
Brilliant article but a couple of mistakes. The testimonial was at HR and when the pitch was cleaned the physio threw a bucket of water on the pitch which turned bright red and everyone at that end including all the City fans went "Uuurgh" I think Brian McClair stayed with him too.Long but worthwhile read:
David Busst is not a religious man so when the chaplain came to see him he felt, not comfort, but concern. Then one of the medics gave it to him straight. He was told that he would wake up from the operation either lying in bed . . . or in an oxygen tent. The tent would have meant that they had amputated his leg.
“That was the scariest moment and I remember waking up, seeing nothing around me and thinking, ‘Something has gone well . . .’ and then looking down the bed, ‘Yeah, still got two.’ ”
The phlegmatic way in which the 55-year-old tells his tale typifies Busst, who could have become one of English football’s saddest stories but has instead traced a journey of resilience and rebirth. Not that he agrees when I say that he’s inspiring. “I don’t see it like that. Mental health is massive but the way I was as a player, when I got injured I naively went on with positivity. ‘This has happened — what’s the next step?’ ” Busst says.
“That’s just how I saw things. Not, ‘Can I play again?’ but, ‘Can I walk again?’ Then, ‘Can I jog?’ ‘Can I kick a ball?’ The little steps.
“When people ask me to talk about mental health, they think, ‘Great, we’re going to get the dark days,’ and instead get positivity. I tell them, ‘I’m probably not the best person.’ ”
We’re at Coventry City’s academy, where Busst has turned up expecting to oversee a couple of sessions for local schoolchildren but instead — to his embarrassment — has found there is a plinth, a plaque, gathered colleagues and a delegation from the Premier League who have come to present him with an award.
As part of the Premier League’s 30th anniversary celebrations, it is honouring “community captains” — unsung heroes, nominated by clubs, who have shown unparalleled commitment to community work. Busst, head of Sky Blues in the Community (SBitC), and an unstinting leader of Coventry’s community work for 25 years, accepts shyly a special armband.
“Now what — do I wear it?” he jokes in his Brummie drawl, keen to puncture any sense of ceremony. “It’s nice to be recognised,” he adds later. “But let’s get on with tomorrow and today.”
What Busst would really like to talk about is other people; the staff, volunteers and beneficiaries of SBitC’s programmes, which include Premier League Kicks and Premier League Stars — funded to the tune of £200,000 by the Premier League, even though it is 21 years since Coventry were in the top flight.
He wants to talk about Ron, who joined a walking football group for over-60s set up to combat isolation and through that took part in a cancer screening scheme, had prostate cancer diagnosed, beat it, and has now done more than 1,000 hours of volunteering for Coventry’s cancer support group — despite having a stroke.
Or Dave, who from childhood had suffered bullying and got to the point — in his 30s — where he was reclusive, suffering PTSD and manic depressions. He lost four stone through Coventry’s fit fans programme and now works as one of the club’s community mentors. “His story,” says Busst, “just blows you away.”
But, of course, I want to talk about the same thing everyone else does, the thing people have asked Busst about for 26 years, and I can’t help noting his limp. For Busst suffered what still seems the grisliest, most distressing, injury in Premier League history — one that, even now, is hard to view pictures of without looking away.
It happened 87 seconds into Manchester United v Coventry, at Old Trafford, on April 8, 1996. Coventry had a corner and worked a favourite routine. Ally Pickering flicked on at the near post and Busst, Coventry’s strapping, blond centre half arrived on cue.
He made contact with the ball (“Should have scored, son,” quipped his manager, Ron Atkinson, when he visited Busst in hospital) but as Busst stretched, Brian McClair arrived from his right and Denis Irwin from his left and in the freak collision Busst’s right leg buckled, his tibia and fibula splintering, with bits of bone breaking through his skin. The image of Busst’s shin making an L-shape as it jammed and caved in on the turf is so gruesome as to barely seem real.
“At the time you just freeze. The pain’s immense. It’s not going away. Shock sets in,” Busst says. He can describe the moment exactly because he didn’t black out. Peter Schmeichel, Manchester United’s goalkeeper that day, still remembers Busst’s screams and the pool of blood in his goalmouth, which had to be mopped away. Dion Dublin knelt with Busst and held his hand until he left on a stretcher, to be taken to hospital.
He had suffered compound spiral fractures of the tibia and fibula and underwent ten operations over the next 12 days, including a fasciotomy — there was no blood supply to the open wound so the back of his calf was peeled off and twisted 45 degrees to enable blood flow to the bone. He had two surgeons, an orthopaedic surgeon for the break and a plastic surgeon to repair the damage.
They pinned his bones together but he developed a severe haematoma on his muscle, which burst. Then he contracted MRSA, the “superbug” that is resistant to antibiotics and kills hundreds every year. Amputation was on the cards if bacteria had come too far, and though Busst’s leg survived, he was left with destroyed muscle and tissue.
“They had to remove four [damaged] tendons in my foot, leaving me one, [inside] the big toe,” he says. “Two years down the line I had another op to pull that tendon tight. I do have dropped foot now — I can’t pull my toes up. But that was an important operation because it pulled [the foot] up to a level where I could start walking.”
In all, Busst had 24 operations. The day after the game, Schmeichel and Eric Cantona tried visiting him but were turned away, because he was in a special unit, but over the six weeks he remained in hospital, other players came to see him, including Steve Bruce and Ryan Giggs.
At weekends Busst was allowed out to see his family and spent these in the Copthorne Hotel near Old Trafford. “One day reception rang and said there was a Man United fan who wanted to have a photograph with me. This young lad appeared, wearing a cap. I looked at him and said, ‘I’m really sorry, but you’re David Beckham, aren’t you?”
“‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Can you sign this ‘To David,’ ” Busst recalls.
It was on one of these weekends at the Copthorne that he saw pictures of his moment of injury for the first time. “There was a copy of the Daily Mirror and my mum had cut out the page — she was trying to hide it from me — but as I picked up the paper the page fell out. I looked and thought, ‘Wow.’ ” Typically, the impact of the injury on his family is what Busst focuses on.
“I remember waking up from one of the operations and seeing my dad sat beside me.
He looked so drawn. My parents were in the ground that day and saw how severe it was, then had to see all the pictures.
“It’s a bit sad because all the attention was on me, but there was the effect on my wife and daughter. My daughter was ten at the time. Nobody thought about what they were going through. And my lad — he never played football. He’s 6ft 9in and rugby is his game. He never knew me as a footballer. It was while I was in hospital that my wife told me she was three months pregnant with him.”
He retired as a player in November 1996, having accepted he would never regain the mobility required for top-level football. “I tried to rehab and went for a couple of weeks but then said to the [Coventry] physio, ‘I shouldn’t be here. I’m a reminder to every player of what can happen.’ ”
After a testimonial at Old Trafford in May 1997, Busst joined Coventry’s community department. At the same time he qualified as a coach but, after a few years managing in non-League football, decided to focus full-time on community work.
He still plays, in a regular six-a-side game with friends. He really does seem positive, happy, and living a regret-free life.
“I was late coming into [professional] football,” he shrugs. “I was 24 when I signed for Coventry and 29 when I retired. From 16, I worked for Britannic Assurance in Birmingham, where my dad was personnel manager and my mum, sister and brother had jobs. I played for the works team and then for Kings Heath and Moor Green in the Midlands comp.
When I signed for Coventry I was on less money than I made at Britannic for selling mortgages and pensions.
“When it was all taken away, I could handle it because I had never planned my life around being a professional footballer. And I guess I just have a positivity that I probably get from my mother, who’s a mad Irish lady.
“My injury? I always felt the positive was that I broke my leg at Old Trafford and not a small stadium [with less medical provision] in a reserve game. It does get in the way sometimes, because you might be at an event where you’re trying to grow the community [department] and have the chance to network with different partners and not talk about football — and then people want to talk about the injury. But at other times, it’s the thing that opens doors.
David Busst: I was just glad I still had two legs – I didn’t know if I’d ever walk again
David Busst is not a religious man so when the chaplain came to see him he felt, not comfort, but concern. Then one of the medics gave it to him straight. He wa
Fergusons_Beard
Well-Known Member
Bayliss with a cracker at Coventry Reserves too.
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Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk Pro
Terry Gibson's perm
Well-Known Member
Shame for him if he hadn’t fallen out with Robins he could have loaned some of our players.
skyblueeyesrevisited
Well-Known Member
Could have taught them how to dive in the box
thekidfromstrettoncamp
Well-Known Member
Is Liam Kelly moon lighting tonight at Rochdale.
Blind-Faith
Well-Known Member
Hyam is already El Capitan at Blackburn I see, must be making a decent impression. Fair play to him