Amid all the euphoria that accompanied those wild celebrations at the King Power Stadium on the evening that Leicester City were crowned champions of England, it escaped unnoticed that one player was struggling to hold everything together. “I felt I didn’t deserve to be there, to be pictured,” Matty James says. “If you ask Danny Drinkwater, when I lifted the Premier League trophy I went to him, he had me in his arms and I was in tears. I was crying my eyes out, purely because I had no part to play in it whatsoever.”
James spent that entire season – the most famous in Leicester’s history – on the sidelines, physically unable to contribute after rupturing the anterior cruciate ligament in his left knee in the penultimate home game of the previous campaign and mentally tormented by the once-in-a-lifetime experience that was unfolding on the pitch while he was fighting to save his career.
“I was going home thinking: ‘What is going on here? The club is going to win the Premier League and I’m nowhere near it,’” James says. “It wasn’t that I didn’t want it to happen. But it was hard because I felt like I was on a rollercoaster going all the way down and the club was going in the opposite direction.”
By the time James did return to Leicester’s lineup, against Arsenal at the beginning of this season, it was 865 days since his previous start for the club – a remarkable statistic that reflects what an ordeal it had been for the midfielder to get back to where he was before the injury happened. That journey has taken in three knee operations, regular visits to a psychologist, emotional conversations with his family about finding another job, desperate attempts to win over Claudio Ranieri, and a kidney infection that left the 26-year-old in so much pain that he says he will “remember it for the rest of my life”.
James has never had any desire to speak publicly about all of this before,
Jordan Adams Womens Jersey yet it is a measure of his positive frame of mind on and off the field now – he has started all three league games this season, recently signed a new four-year deal and is the proud father of a four-month-old boy – that he is happy to talk candidly for more than an hour and a half about everything he has been through.
“I am in a really good place now,” James says. “I’ll be 30 years old when that contract runs out – I didn’t think I was going to get past 25. I thought I was going to be doing something else. But it doesn’t stop here for me. I want to do more things for this club, only without setting big goals, because it’s been a devastating thing for me when I have done that, in terms of the unrealistic ones that I set with the injury. But that’s not to say I don’t have dreams and aspirations.”
Some of those ambitions are fuelled by seeing what Drinkwater, who is one of his closest friends and could line up against him at the King Power Stadium for Chelsea on Saturday,
http://www.officialgrizzliestore.com/authentic-1-jarell-martin-jersey.html has gone on to achieve. The pair enjoyed the best part of a decade together at Manchester United, lived across the road from one another in Cheshire and spent the past five years sharing car journeys to Leicester after joining the club in 2012. “We’re kind of joined at the hip,” says James, smiling. “I rang him the other day and said: ‘You need to get Chelsea on the phone because it’s round about six months we have apart, it can’t be any longer.’”
James is laughing, yet there is a serious point to make about him and Drinkwater, given that before his injury he was keeping out of the Leicester team the man who will be an usher at his wedding next year. Indeed, James could be forgiven for looking at Drinkwater and thinking that it could easily have been him playing for his country, winning a title medal and at the centre of a multimillion-pound transfer.
“I can’t fault what Drinky has done,” he says. “To play for England, win the Premier League and get the move to Chelsea is phenomenal. And for me to be such a good friend, I couldn’t be happier for him. At the same time,
Brad Wing Authentic Jersey you do think: ‘Would I have had that opportunity?’ But it’s only now that I’m getting myself back to the level that I need to be at. Obviously I want to give more. And I think things like Drinky’s story drive me on. There’s no reason why I can’t play for England and achieve things at this football club. And I think Drinky would be the first person to say I can do it. But I’d never say I’m jealous because that’s not the case at all.”
Envy is not something that anyone would associate with James, who is a hugely popular figure among the staff and players at Leicester. Listening to him talk, there is no trace of resentment towards those who were creating history, more a sense of despair and disbelief that he was on the outside looking in, not just injured but enduring setback after setback.
It all started when he ruptured his cruciate ligament in May 2015 in what seemed like a fairly innocuous incident as he chased Ryan Bertrand.
http://www.officialgiantsfootballs.com/Brandon-Marshall-Jersey-Cheap The prognosis after surgery was that he could be out for a year, but James refused to accept that timeline. Initially he made good progress and there was a suggestion he could be involved in an FA Cup replay against Tottenham Hotspur, eight months after he had left the field on a stretcher against Southampton. But then James suffered his first slice of bad luck.
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