Brad Young knew something was wrong but had no idea he had been stabbed until he looked down at his grey tracksuit trousers and saw they were soaked red with blood.
It was a glorious sunny day and minutes before he had been playing football at the local playing field after Covid lockdown restrictions had finally loosened.
Young, an academy hopeful at Aston Villa, was 17 years old and being forced apart from friends for so long was almost cruel.
But the day took a nasty turn when a man attempted to steal his watch, Gucci bag and cap.
The man threw a punch, Young hit him back, then grabbed the guy in a head lock.
There were five others accompanying the mugger and Young’s friends some distance away, so he had intended to throw his assailant to the floor and run.
Then he felt it.
“It was weird,” he tells i. “I didn’t feel like I got stabbed — it felt like a pin, like when you stick paper on a wall, just touching me three times.”
Even when he realised it was far more than a pinprick as he fled, Young thought he had only been stabbed once.
He called 999, screamed down the phone to send an ambulance to Elmdon Park, in Solihull. The responder told him not to panic.
Then his energy left him and two of his friends arrived and he passed one the phone and collapsed.
Young had, in fact, been stabbed three times: once in each buttock and once in his hip. In the most severe wound, the blade sank 12cm into his right buttock and struck an artery.
That Young, now 21, is even playing football again is miraculous.
His is one of several fascinating, tragic, odds-defying stories that have converged at The New Saints FC, a club that has itself defied expectation to transform from a tiny village side to one at the top of Welsh football standing on the verge of becoming the country’s first to qualify for a Uefa competition.
It was, Young believes, make-or-break for his career when he moved to Wales last summer.
Once on the books at West Bromwich Albion then Aston Villa, two loans hadn’t worked out and had he failed in Wales he is sure it was over.
He had never heard of TNS or even the Cymru Premier and suspected it was a prank when he received a WhatsApp from the assistant manager.
He forwarded it to his agent and fast forward 11 months he has become the Cymru Golden Boot and Young Player of the Season winner with 22 goals.
But all this was a distant, unlikely prospect as he lay on the floor, friends holding jackets over his wounds, waiting for the ambulance.
He hadn’t cried in pain but wept when his parents arrived and he told them he loved them for what he feared was the last time.
“I genuinely thought this is my time. In my head I was dying there and then in that park. I remember lying there saying to my mum and dad hand-on-heart I think I’m going to die.”
He was hurried to hospital and had seemed to stabilise while he awaited surgery.
Young asked doctors if he would walk again, if he would play football again, but they had no answers.
“They said I might not be able to get an erection or I might have a colostomy bag to wee and poo in for the rest of my life,” he recalls.
Things took a sharp downward turn again when he went white and so much sweat poured from him it was as though he had taken a shower.
His mum was rushed out of the room, the family were told the medics weren’t sure what was going to happen.
“They had to do three blood transfusions on me — that saved my life because I’d lost a lot of blood,” he says.
He was in intensive care for two days and would have been there longer but told the doctors he could not stay, even though they wanted him to remain until he was able to poo.
It took 15 days. “You should’ve heard my house after I first did a poo — it was like a birthday party everyone was cheering!”
Against the odds, fighting infections and having blood clots removed, Young was somehow able to play again at the start of the season, becoming a key player as Aston Villa won the FA Youth Cup that season, scoring in the final against Liverpool Under-18s.
As a gauge of his level then, Young and Carney Chukwuemeka scored six and seven goals respectively — his teammate securing an £18m move to Chelsea a year later.
But Young failed to break through and was let go last June at the end of his contract.
He was desperately searching for a club until the opportunity arose at TNS, a club that has expanded to represent Llansantffraid and the English town of Oswestry.
It is there he met Craig Harrison, the manager who has overcome his own fair share of adversity to become one of most successful yet still little-known English coaches and stand on the precipice of Welsh history.
When Harrison, now 46, broke through at Middlesbrough in the late 90s he had played alongside Paul Gascoigne, who he had grown up idolising as a fellow Gateshead boy attending the same boys’ club.
But after moving to Crystal Palace his career was ended at 23 by a double compound fracture — when bone is exposed through the skin — in his left leg.
“[Gascoigne] was a fantastic trainer,” Harrison recalls. “He was always very professional. It’s well-documented he had trouble off the pitch but he just loved football — training, playing, being involved, the whole thing.
“Maybe that’s what he struggled with when he came out of it, filling that void. Football was his whole life. As it is for a lot of young children, especially in that area — not the most affluent, it was a way out and an opportunity.
“Football consumes but there is a flip side – I understand through retiring early the tragedy of coming out of football is a bit like a bereavement, there’s a gap to fill.”
Harrison was playing a reserve game when he broke his leg in a tackle, the injury severing muscles and nerves.
He required a blood transfusion to survive. “It was traumatic,” he says.
He had been careful with his earnings and received some insurance money. He credits Simon Jordan, the polarising Talksport presenter and former Crystal Palace owner, for paying his contract in full — “I know he’s a Marmite character, but he was brilliant with me”.
Finally accepting defeat after three operations, Harrison started a successful property business. But he struggled to come to terms with his career ending so early.
“From being a little boy who loved football to a Premier League footballer and suddenly it’s all taken away through no fault of your own, through fate and chance, that was a really tough part of my life.
“It took a long time to come to terms with that. I wanted absolutely nothing to do with football. That was me done with it.
“There was a time span of three or four years when I was in some really dark places and dark times and lonely times.
“Long-term relationship split up, I had strained relationships with friends and family. In the end I managed to pull myself through it.”
How he returned to fall back in love with the game is another bizarre twist to his tale.
His wife Danielle, with whom he shares a young daughter, organised a 30th birthday party and invited Gareth Owen, then manager of Welsh side Airbus UK Broughton, to play a guitar set with a friend.
At the party Harrison got talking to Owen, who asked him to become his assistant.
Initially Harrison declined, but Danielle encouraged him.
“She was a professional dancer in the West End,” he explains.
“She lived a similar life, dedicated to dancing, moving to dance school at 11. She knew the passion and dedication I had and pushed me towards it.”
At the end of the season Owen left, Harrison took over and completed his Uefa coaching badges.
“From then on there was no looking back. I enjoyed it, got the enthusiasm back.”
Since moving to TNS in 2011 he has won the Welsh title eight times, including an “Invincible” unbeaten season last season.
Winning the Welsh top flight earns a place in Uefa qualifiers, but no side has ever made it through.
“It’s been a long eventful road to being on the verge of the first Welsh team to qualify for the Europa League,” he says.
Overcome a one-goal deficit against Moldovan Super Liga club Petrocub on Tuesday and they will make it.
Everything he has been through drives him to strive for more.
“I always think you never know what’s around the corner.
“I remember as if it was yesterday: I was a substitute against Newcastle, at St James Park, in the FA Cup, 5 January 2002, I played a reserve game on 9 January and I broke me leg and I never played again.
“It happens as quick as that. It’s made me want to push myself, the coaching staff, the club, the players, as far as I can, every day.”
Over the years he has not reflected much on the day his playing career ended, but after he sadly lost his mum two and a half years ago he has “become a lot more reflective,” he says.
“She was only 65 so she was not old. I probably don’t give myself as much credit as I should, I always think there’s something else to do, that we should be better in everything, even if it’s that one per cent. It could be the difference between making history and not.
“I’m extremely proud of what I’ve done, the staff, the players, how the football club has moved forward. I couldn’t have done it without my wife and little girl to support us.”
from Football - inews.co.uk https://ift.tt/TpetQW3
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