Watford's Damien Francis and Gareth Williams shared with Soccer AM the life of a footballer laid up with injury.
Soccer AM
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Flying high in the Championship with 16 points from their opening seven games, it is fair to say that Watford have drawn a line under the disappointment of relegation from the Premiership last season.
On Saturday Watford welcomed to Blackpool to Vicarage Road, where they are unbeaten in four matches this season having conceded only two goals but scored nine.
Gareth Williams and Damien Francis will have taken no part in the football on Saturday afternoon, as they haven't in any of the matches that have taken the Hornets to the top of the Championship, as both are out with identical injuries.
Midfielders Williams, 25, and Francis, 28, suffered cruciate ligament injuries to their knees within a fortnight of one another and well down the long road to recovery
For Williams the injury came as a severe blow as it happened only two games into his Watford career, the club he had finally joined that gave him a crack at the Premier League last season after spells in the Championship with Nottingham Forest and Leicester.
He told
Soccer AM all about it and had a refreshingly philosophical attitude to a situation that would have left lesser men down in the dumps.
"It was such a quick thing to happen," he said. "I felt like it had been such a long time for me to reach the Premiership, managing to get there for a couple of months and have it taken away from you is disappointing but that is part of the game.
"There is nothing you can do about it and in a strange way, it has brought me closer to the boys and almost made me feel more part of the club than if I had been playing so you have to take it on the chin, learn from it and come back a better person and be a better player.
"You still have to be positive about it. To come back from four operations from one injury is not easy but I am still young and I hope I have my best years ahead of me, unlike this man next to me."
That man is Francis, of course, and he had taken his place on the
Soccer AM sofa only 24 hours after lying on the operating table, with a surgeon chopping bits out of his knee.
As he explains: "I had the second operation yesterday morning on my cartilage, there was a bit flapping around that they had to trim down.
"I don't know how flappy it was, you will have to ask the surgeon."
No thanks. Francis does explain though that having someone else in your situation makes the whole scenario easier to live with.
He said: "It is definitely easier because obviously every day we are in the gym doing the same things, over and over again, and so we get to compare notes day in, day out.
"He gets me through it and I get him through it."
So what do they do with their day?
Williams says: "It is a good question. Everybody asks you what footballers do in their spare time and I could think of a lot of things but I can't really give a straightforward answer."
So Damien tries, saying "We are at the training ground from the morning to the later afternoon and we are there more than the other guys, until half past four sometimes.
"We start at, like, half nine. For a footballer that is a long day!"
They're not complaining, but still, for once, it hard not to feel sorry for a pair of footballers, because there can be little worse than not being able to play.
At least they have each other.
