The Torygraph had a long long read on Oxlade-Chamberlain’s year out. I’m on my phone so can’t be arsed binnying the article.
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It was a surreal feeling, Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain recalls, out on the Olympic Stadium pitch in Kiev around midnight on May 26 with the Champions League final lost, the party very much over and a fresh dawning that it could be another year until he played football again.
His newly-reconstructed right knee was in a brace, and he can chuckle now at the absurdity of trying to propel himself around the turf on crutches while also wiping away tears and applauding the Liverpool fans. His intention had been to console his beaten team-mates and then he felt something quite profoundly. One month earlier he had raced after Aleksandar Kolarov to challenge the Roma defender for a ball at Anfield in the semi-final first leg and a one-in-a-million collision had sent a shockwave through his knee that left in its wake a trail of extraordinary damage.
“An injury, within an injury, within an injury,” is how he describes it, but until the end in Kiev, he had not allowed himself to think too much about what lay ahead. “That stadium is really big but it felt far away in the middle of the pitch, looking at the Liverpool fans,” he recalls. “It was just like a vortex. Realising where I really was and what had really happened. It all just hit me at once. I had never really got upset. The day I found out the news about the injury I was choking up but I am not that sort of person that feels down.”
Watching the final against Real Madrid he was absorbed by the feeling that he could have made a difference. His role under Jurgen Klopp had been drummed into him over hours of training at Melwood, a new regime at a new club where he felt utterly transformed in the space of nine months. A structure of play that made him feel that he knew exactly what he was doing. He had a new seniority, at a club where he was no longer considered a kid. A manager who told him – in fact, ordered him – to shoot when he had the chance, gradually unpicking years of feeling he should defer to senior players.
“Jurgen was saying to me, ‘On the pitch you need to start being the man. Go and be the man’. In so many words he just said that, ‘You are good at shooting, just shoot. You don’t need to keep passing. I want you to shoot.’ It sounds silly, doesn’t it? Playing at the level I did for seven years and being told I need to shoot.”
Against Manchester City in the quarter-final first leg he had done just that, a strike that flew past goalkeeper Ederson and helped establish a lead that would end in victories home and away. This new way of playing was an awakening for him. At Arsenal he had worked with a psychologist to try to throw off the shackles of something he noticed had transferred from his personal life into his professional life. He had always tried hard to please people – friends, family, team-mates – sometimes at the expense of his own wishes. The reluctance to shoot came also from the instinct that he must “always find a better option”. It had become representative of his whole life.
“Please the manager, please the fans, please my team-mates,” he says. “Be the guy that pulled everyone together and helped everyone. If Gibbo [Kieran Gibbs] needed a lift home, no problem, have a lift home. You need that Alexis [Sanchez]? No problem. Or my friends wanted to be at the house. Because I can do it and it’s not really an issue I would say ‘Yes’. I didn’t have control of my own life, even though I should have.”
Then he found himself driving with the ball towards City’s penalty area, with the words of Klopp in his mind. “He always used to say to me, ‘What’s the difference between you and Mo [Salah]? Why does he score so many goals? Because I watch you both shoot in training and you’re just as good. It’s because Mo believes he can and you don’t. Simple. Mo believes he is going to score and Mo does score. You? You don’t believe it yet’”.
In those months leading up to the Roma game his life, and his football, felt like it was starting to make sense. He was playing centre midfield, the position he always considered his best. The intensity of the training had changed him physically. For the first time he could play three games in a week without any problems. It took him “to a different level, to a gear I didn’t know I had”. Then came the collision, followed by that moment in Kiev and suddenly he was contemplating months of isolation, nurturing a broken knee back to health in tiny incremental steps.
It was a case of - now what? What the hell was the point in this? It was all meant to be so worth it. I have done this injury for the lads in the semis, now I am screwed. Now we have got nothing. I almost didn’t mind missing the World Cup because we were going to win the Champions League. It all just hit me big. Seeing the lads so upset and being so close. We really wanted that.”
He thinks back to the Real Madrid players, casually celebrating a third straight title, a triumph that had become routine for them. He knows it sounds daft but he cannot help the thought. “I kind of felt we deserved it more than them … because they have it every year.” For the previous 33 days one thought had dominated his emotions. “I was just thinking, ‘Let’s win the Champions League and then it’s worth it. Everything is worth it’.”
We are sitting in the kitchen of Oxlade-Chamberlain’s home in Cheshire going through the story of his injury in detail, a total of five hours of interviews conducted over several months, looking through the pictures on his phone of his knee before surgery and afterwards. Then the video of what he calls “my second procedure that nobody knows about”. On Aug 1, his surgeon Andy Williams put him under general anaesthetic again to manipulate his right knee to help its flexion. The video is stark. Oxlade-Chamberlain’s sizeable sprinter’s thigh being wrestled backwards by the eminent surgeon and the scar tissue audibly tearing and popping. “I like that video,” Oxlade-Chamberlain says, “because I can hear him really doing something to me.”
The story of his injury could not be told without the story of his move from Arsenal to Liverpool in the summer of 2017, and the uncertainty that accompanied it. Uncertainty because he had left one of English football’s greatest clubs, Arsenal, for whom he had signed in 2011, one week before his 18th birthday. In leaving Arsenal he was also stepping away from one of the guiding influences of his career, Arsene Wenger who, in that way that great managers are with young players, was more than just a coach. The bond was strong there, and his feeling of gratitude towards Wenger has never wavered. “I feel like I wouldn’t be the person I am without his faith,” he says.
Now, at the end of 12 months’ rehabilitation he has finally returned, playing his first competitive minutes of the most recent league win over Huddersfield Town, with a rebuilt right knee and a re-strung lateral hamstring in the same leg. At 25, he is still young but the break has given time for reflection. He wants to be honest about how it is to leave one of English football’s powerhouses for another, and cope with change, success and injury.
Curious fact: the stock of rentable houses in that Cheshire enclave to the south of Manchester which offer big-name footballers the requisite privacy is small. New signings battle over them from the beginning of the summer when the recruitment process begins for the region’s biggest clubs. For instance, Salah, who arrived on June 22, 2017, already had his home by the time Oxlade-Chamberlain signed for Liverpool for £35 million, on deadline day Aug 31. He spent eight weeks living at the Titanic hotel in Liverpool where he would often pass Gylfi Sigurdsson, then Everton’s record signing, at breakfast. “Both in the same situation,” he says, “both scrambling for a house, probably viewing the same house and then it’s like a race.”
It should be said that Oxlade-Chamberlain finds this as funny and surreal as you do. He has a home in London with his girlfriend Perrie Edwards, of the pop group Little Mix, so it made sense to rent in the north-west. “I might see a house and be stalling for a day and next thing I get a call and, oh no, Aaron Lennon has paid up front. I go and view a house and I’m told, ‘Just to let you know, Riyad Mahrez is viewing it today’. I’m thinking, ‘Oh God, I’ve got my work cut out there - Mahrez has signed for City’”.
As much as he warmed to life at the club straight away, it all contributed to the feeling in those early days that things were not quite developing as he had planned. By mid-November 2017, when the England squad for the Germany and Brazil friendlies was selected, he was yet to start a league game. Gareth Southgate left him out. “Then Jurgen pulled me aside and this is when I first started to see the sort of guy he was. It was at a time when I wasn’t performing. I felt I still hadn’t proved him right in signing me yet. He said, ‘He [Southgate] hasn’t picked you, has he?’ I was like, ‘No, boss’. Part of me is thinking, ‘Any chance? I came here when I was in the England squad and now I’m not. I haven’t played’.
“He said, ‘It’ll change soon, don’t worry about it’. Then he started me the next game, at West Ham. I scored and we won and he said ‘It will be soon, don’t worry’. That was the first time I saw that when things didn’t seem like they were going well at this place, you are still in there. I had been used to it being different. That if you start edging out the way, you stay out the way for a while.”
Liverpool players train intensely. The nature of the last two seasons, with the club progressing far in Europe, has meant little more than a single day off a month with the intention that the entire squad – regulars or otherwise - are at the same fitness level.
“For my first two three months I really struggled physically. It was completely different from what I was used to. How you see him [Klopp] on the pitch, shouting - that is the same in training if you are not running. It was different at Arsenal. There, the next day I would be doing a separate training session or sneaking into the recovery session with the boys who started. Whereas here I am training the same as those who did not play. I was hanging on in there.
“When you make it over the brow of the hill you are flying. I felt I would not be getting injured. I could sprint all day and no hamstrings were going anywhere. Muscularity … I felt as strong as I had ever been, just from playing.”
“By Christmas,” he says, “I felt unstoppable”. But it was not just the fitness, it was the role that Klopp had carved for him as part of that central midfield three, the position he had always wanted to play. The reason he had joined Arsenal from Southampton in 2010 was because Wenger had told him that he too saw him ultimately as a central midfielder. It was that which had made Wenger stand apart from other interested clubs when it came to him leaving Southampton at 17.
“I knew my role and I knew where I had to run. When Trent [Alexander-Arnold] gets the ball, Salah comes to feet and I am off. Sometimes if Salah goes inside I play on the wing for a bit. We had a certain way of playing together and it just became so easy. It was like for the first time I wasn’t free-styling the whole game. There were times in my younger career when if I had been out the game for ten minutes I would start wandering and trying to get involved and then lose sight of what I needed to do. You start forcing things. Here, they [his team-mates] know what I’m doing. If they don’t get me the ball then they will be getting told by him [Klopp].”
And then there was the shooting. “The lessons I learned at Arsenal helped me in so many ways, but it did mean I had to adapt when I left. The emphasis was different there. More about trying to find a better option. That was Arsenal’s way and it had worked for them well. So, when I saw a run and heard a shout my instinct would be to play it. The boss [Klopp] hates that. He would say ‘I don’t watch you shooting all week [in training] to try to be Iniesta and thread a pass’. He would scream at me ‘SHOOOOOT!’ It goes in or it misses but in his head it is, ‘So what? Mo and Sadio are running in’.”
He tells a story of his only cross words with Klopp at Old Trafford in the 2-1 defeat to Manchester United in March when the German was furious with him in the first half for not shooting enough. In one instance Oxlade-Chamberlain had thought Sadio Mane in a better position and had tried to play him in. A dialogue ensued between player and manager on the touchline and in the second half Oxlade-Chamberlain resolved to shoot every time. “Probably too optimistic”, he admits.
“When the emotions had settled from losing the boss said, ‘You caused me all sorts of problems. When you kept shooting in the second half and I was getting angry, Jose [Mourinho] turned to me and said, “But at least he listens, Jurgen”. I didn’t know whether to laugh, cry or punch him’. We were both laughing.”
It would be wrong to say that the goals were flying in, he scored five all season, although he felt differently. He had always been eager to please, always looked for the pass. Not just on the pitch. It was years before, in restaurants, he started asking people who approached him mid-meal for a picture to wait until he was finished. At last he was learning to be a bit selfish.
“I was 24 but I didn’t go from being a kid to becoming a man quick enough. I got chucked into this world of ‘Okay, you’re 18, deal with it’ and I just put on a front. But the basic things in life I never really got a hold of. Little traits off the pitch I was taking into the workplace.
“It comes down to, what is your personality like? There are other players who don’t care if you are moaning. But I did care. If I shoot and miss and someone is moaning then next time I am more likely to pass because that was me as a character. That was the biggest thing that shouted out to me.
“The boys that do the best, they are ruthless. You can’t keep everyone happy. Some people will like you, some won’t. Most of the time I wanted to please everyone and make them proud and it is just impossible to do.”
He had left Arsenal for the benefit of his career and now he felt he was taking the next step. As a young player he had watched Steven Gerrard take responsibility, when others might have hesitated. He noticed how a player’s confidence affected the way people thought about him. “When Stevie used to have a shot, I would think, ‘It makes sense’. Now I was starting to feel that. I was on the way to showing I can be the man to try a few of these things. It feels quite nice. It’s a weird thing. You have been around for seven years at Arsenal and Southampton but you are only starting to find your mojo.”
What needs to be said first about Oxlade-Chamberlain’s injury is that he does not feel sorry for himself. He is of a naturally sunny disposition and above that he understands that some people live with disability their whole lives. He was on crutches for six weeks. So even the times when he had to sit on the loo with his leg propped up straight, or when he would wake in the middle of the night immobile and bursting for a pee, he kept it in perspective. He had the best possible treatment from one of the world’s leading surgeons. He had the full expertise of Liverpool’s medical department for his rehab. He even had as many disposable bedpans as he wanted. It was just that, being a nice chap, he felt he could not wake his partner Perrie to empty them in the middle of the night.
Oxlade-Chamberlain’s father Mark was an England international. His mother Wendy is a physiotherapist. Alex himself knows the muscle groups, ligaments and tendons well, to the extent that he admits the real physios grow tired of his zest for diagnosis. He had also been relatively seriously injured before, and it had cost him dearly – missing the 2014 World Cup and later, Euro 2016. So when, after 15 minutes against Roma he made that contact with Kolarov, he knew it was bad. The Serb had stepped out sideways to protect the ball from the tackle coming down his right side meaning that it was a case of two directly opposing forces colliding. Anywhere else on Oxlade-Chamberlain’s leg and it would have been a bruise. It was his knee. His leg “bowed” around that of his opponent. In that moment of hyperextension the extent of the damage was astonishing.
He ruptured his anterior cruciate ligament, the scourge of the footballer. Nine months’ recovery minimum. It was likely that the ACL was the last to go in the impact and in some respects was the least of his worries. Normally the ACL is damaged by a jolt or an awkward landing but in this case it was sheer force coming from the collision point on the inside of his knee. His lateral hamstring tore off the bone, the head of fibula, and recoiled back up. His lateral collateral ligament was ruptured.
It would be days until he discovered all this. At first he tried to play on but the leg buckled every time he put weight on it. At his side was Liverpool’s doctor, Andy Massie. “Not a random doctor. The doctor you speak to every day. He knows your interests, your aspirations and he has to be the one to drop you the news. The line I hate the most is, ‘It’s best we come off’. I’d rather they were like, ‘No, your knee is knackered, you’re off.’ In my head I am thinking rationally. Can I play on? Can I make the final? Can I make the World Cup? Yes or no. I don’t want in-between. I want to know.”
In the treatment room, still in his kit, he asked that question again and again of Richie Partridge, the former Liverpool youth team player and now a physiotherapist. But there could be no definitive answers and beyond the four walls he could hear Liverpool taking control of the semi-final. He recalls “the muffled roar” of goal after goal being scored. By the time he turned on a television they were five up. He knew that he could be missing a Champions League final.
“Your world stops,” he says, “and everything just continues.” We discuss the relentlessness of football, talking at a time when the death of the Cardiff City striker Emiliano Sala is uppermost in everyone’s minds. “That is the most horrendous thing,” Oxlade-Chamberlain says, “and then all of a sudden we play a game and it’s, ‘Wahey, Salah scored!’ ‘Vardy scored! Hurray!’ It’s hard to comprehend. Some people’s lives are finished right now and we are all just carrying on.
It had been a struggle to get his kit off for a shower, and then he had to hold his leg straight, his right knee best described as “wobbly”. Driving was impossible and he had to be taken to his scan three days later in Cheshire and then on to Melwood, Liverpool’s training ground. By the time he arrived, Dr Massie already had the scan results. It was nice to be back among the squad again, joyful at the prospect of a Champions League final drawing ever closer. But he could not put off what he was there for, and when he shut the door it was just him and the doctor in the room.
“You are trying to suss them out quickly. Our doc is very jokey. Not that he doesn’t care but even if something seems really bad he will manage to be very positive and upbeat. I saw it in him straight away and I thought ‘Ah, no’. I just remember going from being okay to trying not to cry. I couldn’t believe what he told me. He just started with the words, ‘I’m sorry, it’s not good at all’.”
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It was a surreal feeling, Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain recalls, out on the Olympic Stadium pitch in Kiev around midnight on May 26 with the Champions League final lost, the party very much over and a fresh dawning that it could be another year until he played football again.
His newly-reconstructed right knee was in a brace, and he can chuckle now at the absurdity of trying to propel himself around the turf on crutches while also wiping away tears and applauding the Liverpool fans. His intention had been to console his beaten team-mates and then he felt something quite profoundly. One month earlier he had raced after Aleksandar Kolarov to challenge the Roma defender for a ball at Anfield in the semi-final first leg and a one-in-a-million collision had sent a shockwave through his knee that left in its wake a trail of extraordinary damage.
“An injury, within an injury, within an injury,” is how he describes it, but until the end in Kiev, he had not allowed himself to think too much about what lay ahead. “That stadium is really big but it felt far away in the middle of the pitch, looking at the Liverpool fans,” he recalls. “It was just like a vortex. Realising where I really was and what had really happened. It all just hit me at once. I had never really got upset. The day I found out the news about the injury I was choking up but I am not that sort of person that feels down.”
Watching the final against Real Madrid he was absorbed by the feeling that he could have made a difference. His role under Jurgen Klopp had been drummed into him over hours of training at Melwood, a new regime at a new club where he felt utterly transformed in the space of nine months. A structure of play that made him feel that he knew exactly what he was doing. He had a new seniority, at a club where he was no longer considered a kid. A manager who told him – in fact, ordered him – to shoot when he had the chance, gradually unpicking years of feeling he should defer to senior players.
“Jurgen was saying to me, ‘On the pitch you need to start being the man. Go and be the man’. In so many words he just said that, ‘You are good at shooting, just shoot. You don’t need to keep passing. I want you to shoot.’ It sounds silly, doesn’t it? Playing at the level I did for seven years and being told I need to shoot.”
Against Manchester City in the quarter-final first leg he had done just that, a strike that flew past goalkeeper Ederson and helped establish a lead that would end in victories home and away. This new way of playing was an awakening for him. At Arsenal he had worked with a psychologist to try to throw off the shackles of something he noticed had transferred from his personal life into his professional life. He had always tried hard to please people – friends, family, team-mates – sometimes at the expense of his own wishes. The reluctance to shoot came also from the instinct that he must “always find a better option”. It had become representative of his whole life.
“Please the manager, please the fans, please my team-mates,” he says. “Be the guy that pulled everyone together and helped everyone. If Gibbo [Kieran Gibbs] needed a lift home, no problem, have a lift home. You need that Alexis [Sanchez]? No problem. Or my friends wanted to be at the house. Because I can do it and it’s not really an issue I would say ‘Yes’. I didn’t have control of my own life, even though I should have.”
Then he found himself driving with the ball towards City’s penalty area, with the words of Klopp in his mind. “He always used to say to me, ‘What’s the difference between you and Mo [Salah]? Why does he score so many goals? Because I watch you both shoot in training and you’re just as good. It’s because Mo believes he can and you don’t. Simple. Mo believes he is going to score and Mo does score. You? You don’t believe it yet’”.
In those months leading up to the Roma game his life, and his football, felt like it was starting to make sense. He was playing centre midfield, the position he always considered his best. The intensity of the training had changed him physically. For the first time he could play three games in a week without any problems. It took him “to a different level, to a gear I didn’t know I had”. Then came the collision, followed by that moment in Kiev and suddenly he was contemplating months of isolation, nurturing a broken knee back to health in tiny incremental steps.
It was a case of - now what? What the hell was the point in this? It was all meant to be so worth it. I have done this injury for the lads in the semis, now I am screwed. Now we have got nothing. I almost didn’t mind missing the World Cup because we were going to win the Champions League. It all just hit me big. Seeing the lads so upset and being so close. We really wanted that.”
He thinks back to the Real Madrid players, casually celebrating a third straight title, a triumph that had become routine for them. He knows it sounds daft but he cannot help the thought. “I kind of felt we deserved it more than them … because they have it every year.” For the previous 33 days one thought had dominated his emotions. “I was just thinking, ‘Let’s win the Champions League and then it’s worth it. Everything is worth it’.”
We are sitting in the kitchen of Oxlade-Chamberlain’s home in Cheshire going through the story of his injury in detail, a total of five hours of interviews conducted over several months, looking through the pictures on his phone of his knee before surgery and afterwards. Then the video of what he calls “my second procedure that nobody knows about”. On Aug 1, his surgeon Andy Williams put him under general anaesthetic again to manipulate his right knee to help its flexion. The video is stark. Oxlade-Chamberlain’s sizeable sprinter’s thigh being wrestled backwards by the eminent surgeon and the scar tissue audibly tearing and popping. “I like that video,” Oxlade-Chamberlain says, “because I can hear him really doing something to me.”
The story of his injury could not be told without the story of his move from Arsenal to Liverpool in the summer of 2017, and the uncertainty that accompanied it. Uncertainty because he had left one of English football’s greatest clubs, Arsenal, for whom he had signed in 2011, one week before his 18th birthday. In leaving Arsenal he was also stepping away from one of the guiding influences of his career, Arsene Wenger who, in that way that great managers are with young players, was more than just a coach. The bond was strong there, and his feeling of gratitude towards Wenger has never wavered. “I feel like I wouldn’t be the person I am without his faith,” he says.
Now, at the end of 12 months’ rehabilitation he has finally returned, playing his first competitive minutes of the most recent league win over Huddersfield Town, with a rebuilt right knee and a re-strung lateral hamstring in the same leg. At 25, he is still young but the break has given time for reflection. He wants to be honest about how it is to leave one of English football’s powerhouses for another, and cope with change, success and injury.
Curious fact: the stock of rentable houses in that Cheshire enclave to the south of Manchester which offer big-name footballers the requisite privacy is small. New signings battle over them from the beginning of the summer when the recruitment process begins for the region’s biggest clubs. For instance, Salah, who arrived on June 22, 2017, already had his home by the time Oxlade-Chamberlain signed for Liverpool for £35 million, on deadline day Aug 31. He spent eight weeks living at the Titanic hotel in Liverpool where he would often pass Gylfi Sigurdsson, then Everton’s record signing, at breakfast. “Both in the same situation,” he says, “both scrambling for a house, probably viewing the same house and then it’s like a race.”
It should be said that Oxlade-Chamberlain finds this as funny and surreal as you do. He has a home in London with his girlfriend Perrie Edwards, of the pop group Little Mix, so it made sense to rent in the north-west. “I might see a house and be stalling for a day and next thing I get a call and, oh no, Aaron Lennon has paid up front. I go and view a house and I’m told, ‘Just to let you know, Riyad Mahrez is viewing it today’. I’m thinking, ‘Oh God, I’ve got my work cut out there - Mahrez has signed for City’”.
As much as he warmed to life at the club straight away, it all contributed to the feeling in those early days that things were not quite developing as he had planned. By mid-November 2017, when the England squad for the Germany and Brazil friendlies was selected, he was yet to start a league game. Gareth Southgate left him out. “Then Jurgen pulled me aside and this is when I first started to see the sort of guy he was. It was at a time when I wasn’t performing. I felt I still hadn’t proved him right in signing me yet. He said, ‘He [Southgate] hasn’t picked you, has he?’ I was like, ‘No, boss’. Part of me is thinking, ‘Any chance? I came here when I was in the England squad and now I’m not. I haven’t played’.
“He said, ‘It’ll change soon, don’t worry about it’. Then he started me the next game, at West Ham. I scored and we won and he said ‘It will be soon, don’t worry’. That was the first time I saw that when things didn’t seem like they were going well at this place, you are still in there. I had been used to it being different. That if you start edging out the way, you stay out the way for a while.”
Liverpool players train intensely. The nature of the last two seasons, with the club progressing far in Europe, has meant little more than a single day off a month with the intention that the entire squad – regulars or otherwise - are at the same fitness level.
“For my first two three months I really struggled physically. It was completely different from what I was used to. How you see him [Klopp] on the pitch, shouting - that is the same in training if you are not running. It was different at Arsenal. There, the next day I would be doing a separate training session or sneaking into the recovery session with the boys who started. Whereas here I am training the same as those who did not play. I was hanging on in there.
“When you make it over the brow of the hill you are flying. I felt I would not be getting injured. I could sprint all day and no hamstrings were going anywhere. Muscularity … I felt as strong as I had ever been, just from playing.”
“By Christmas,” he says, “I felt unstoppable”. But it was not just the fitness, it was the role that Klopp had carved for him as part of that central midfield three, the position he had always wanted to play. The reason he had joined Arsenal from Southampton in 2010 was because Wenger had told him that he too saw him ultimately as a central midfielder. It was that which had made Wenger stand apart from other interested clubs when it came to him leaving Southampton at 17.
“I knew my role and I knew where I had to run. When Trent [Alexander-Arnold] gets the ball, Salah comes to feet and I am off. Sometimes if Salah goes inside I play on the wing for a bit. We had a certain way of playing together and it just became so easy. It was like for the first time I wasn’t free-styling the whole game. There were times in my younger career when if I had been out the game for ten minutes I would start wandering and trying to get involved and then lose sight of what I needed to do. You start forcing things. Here, they [his team-mates] know what I’m doing. If they don’t get me the ball then they will be getting told by him [Klopp].”
And then there was the shooting. “The lessons I learned at Arsenal helped me in so many ways, but it did mean I had to adapt when I left. The emphasis was different there. More about trying to find a better option. That was Arsenal’s way and it had worked for them well. So, when I saw a run and heard a shout my instinct would be to play it. The boss [Klopp] hates that. He would say ‘I don’t watch you shooting all week [in training] to try to be Iniesta and thread a pass’. He would scream at me ‘SHOOOOOT!’ It goes in or it misses but in his head it is, ‘So what? Mo and Sadio are running in’.”
He tells a story of his only cross words with Klopp at Old Trafford in the 2-1 defeat to Manchester United in March when the German was furious with him in the first half for not shooting enough. In one instance Oxlade-Chamberlain had thought Sadio Mane in a better position and had tried to play him in. A dialogue ensued between player and manager on the touchline and in the second half Oxlade-Chamberlain resolved to shoot every time. “Probably too optimistic”, he admits.
“When the emotions had settled from losing the boss said, ‘You caused me all sorts of problems. When you kept shooting in the second half and I was getting angry, Jose [Mourinho] turned to me and said, “But at least he listens, Jurgen”. I didn’t know whether to laugh, cry or punch him’. We were both laughing.”
It would be wrong to say that the goals were flying in, he scored five all season, although he felt differently. He had always been eager to please, always looked for the pass. Not just on the pitch. It was years before, in restaurants, he started asking people who approached him mid-meal for a picture to wait until he was finished. At last he was learning to be a bit selfish.
“I was 24 but I didn’t go from being a kid to becoming a man quick enough. I got chucked into this world of ‘Okay, you’re 18, deal with it’ and I just put on a front. But the basic things in life I never really got a hold of. Little traits off the pitch I was taking into the workplace.
“It comes down to, what is your personality like? There are other players who don’t care if you are moaning. But I did care. If I shoot and miss and someone is moaning then next time I am more likely to pass because that was me as a character. That was the biggest thing that shouted out to me.
“The boys that do the best, they are ruthless. You can’t keep everyone happy. Some people will like you, some won’t. Most of the time I wanted to please everyone and make them proud and it is just impossible to do.”
He had left Arsenal for the benefit of his career and now he felt he was taking the next step. As a young player he had watched Steven Gerrard take responsibility, when others might have hesitated. He noticed how a player’s confidence affected the way people thought about him. “When Stevie used to have a shot, I would think, ‘It makes sense’. Now I was starting to feel that. I was on the way to showing I can be the man to try a few of these things. It feels quite nice. It’s a weird thing. You have been around for seven years at Arsenal and Southampton but you are only starting to find your mojo.”
What needs to be said first about Oxlade-Chamberlain’s injury is that he does not feel sorry for himself. He is of a naturally sunny disposition and above that he understands that some people live with disability their whole lives. He was on crutches for six weeks. So even the times when he had to sit on the loo with his leg propped up straight, or when he would wake in the middle of the night immobile and bursting for a pee, he kept it in perspective. He had the best possible treatment from one of the world’s leading surgeons. He had the full expertise of Liverpool’s medical department for his rehab. He even had as many disposable bedpans as he wanted. It was just that, being a nice chap, he felt he could not wake his partner Perrie to empty them in the middle of the night.
Oxlade-Chamberlain’s father Mark was an England international. His mother Wendy is a physiotherapist. Alex himself knows the muscle groups, ligaments and tendons well, to the extent that he admits the real physios grow tired of his zest for diagnosis. He had also been relatively seriously injured before, and it had cost him dearly – missing the 2014 World Cup and later, Euro 2016. So when, after 15 minutes against Roma he made that contact with Kolarov, he knew it was bad. The Serb had stepped out sideways to protect the ball from the tackle coming down his right side meaning that it was a case of two directly opposing forces colliding. Anywhere else on Oxlade-Chamberlain’s leg and it would have been a bruise. It was his knee. His leg “bowed” around that of his opponent. In that moment of hyperextension the extent of the damage was astonishing.
He ruptured his anterior cruciate ligament, the scourge of the footballer. Nine months’ recovery minimum. It was likely that the ACL was the last to go in the impact and in some respects was the least of his worries. Normally the ACL is damaged by a jolt or an awkward landing but in this case it was sheer force coming from the collision point on the inside of his knee. His lateral hamstring tore off the bone, the head of fibula, and recoiled back up. His lateral collateral ligament was ruptured.
It would be days until he discovered all this. At first he tried to play on but the leg buckled every time he put weight on it. At his side was Liverpool’s doctor, Andy Massie. “Not a random doctor. The doctor you speak to every day. He knows your interests, your aspirations and he has to be the one to drop you the news. The line I hate the most is, ‘It’s best we come off’. I’d rather they were like, ‘No, your knee is knackered, you’re off.’ In my head I am thinking rationally. Can I play on? Can I make the final? Can I make the World Cup? Yes or no. I don’t want in-between. I want to know.”
In the treatment room, still in his kit, he asked that question again and again of Richie Partridge, the former Liverpool youth team player and now a physiotherapist. But there could be no definitive answers and beyond the four walls he could hear Liverpool taking control of the semi-final. He recalls “the muffled roar” of goal after goal being scored. By the time he turned on a television they were five up. He knew that he could be missing a Champions League final.
“Your world stops,” he says, “and everything just continues.” We discuss the relentlessness of football, talking at a time when the death of the Cardiff City striker Emiliano Sala is uppermost in everyone’s minds. “That is the most horrendous thing,” Oxlade-Chamberlain says, “and then all of a sudden we play a game and it’s, ‘Wahey, Salah scored!’ ‘Vardy scored! Hurray!’ It’s hard to comprehend. Some people’s lives are finished right now and we are all just carrying on.
It had been a struggle to get his kit off for a shower, and then he had to hold his leg straight, his right knee best described as “wobbly”. Driving was impossible and he had to be taken to his scan three days later in Cheshire and then on to Melwood, Liverpool’s training ground. By the time he arrived, Dr Massie already had the scan results. It was nice to be back among the squad again, joyful at the prospect of a Champions League final drawing ever closer. But he could not put off what he was there for, and when he shut the door it was just him and the doctor in the room.
“You are trying to suss them out quickly. Our doc is very jokey. Not that he doesn’t care but even if something seems really bad he will manage to be very positive and upbeat. I saw it in him straight away and I thought ‘Ah, no’. I just remember going from being okay to trying not to cry. I couldn’t believe what he told me. He just started with the words, ‘I’m sorry, it’s not good at all’.”
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