Mata ready for difficult month
JUAN MATA says that Manchester United are facing a make-or-break month for their season.
United have a daunting spell before the next international break which could leave them out of the title race and struggling to reach the Champions League knockout stage, while intensifying the scrutiny on manager Jose Mourinho.
On Saturday they go to Mata’s old club Chelsea, then they have Champions League games against Cristiano Ronaldo’s Juventus, plus clashes against improving Everton and Bournemouth before the Manchester derby against Premier League champions City on November 11.
“It is definitely a difficult month,” he said. “It is a fixture list that is going to ask for our best football.
“But if we have good results it could be a very good month in terms of points, mindset and also confidence. Let us see where we are in November and December.”
Mata added: “Saturday is a special game for me. I have very good memories from Stamford Bridge and from the fans there.
“I was at Chelsea for two-and-a-half years, so before and after the game I see some friendly faces – but that goes away when you are on the pitch. Our aim is to change our negative run of results at Stamford Bridge.
“We are hoping to play at a high level and return with a win.
“We will try to be clinical in the chances we have, defend well and play with confidence.
“We have to believe we can win, we need that mentality in those important games.”
Mata is hoping for a recall to the starting line-up after coming on as a substitute to spark their comeback win against Newcastle with a superb free-kick goal at Old Trafford. REPORTS BEN THORNLEY has never allowed himself to be consumed by resentment or bitterness over what might have been – “it would have eaten me up,” he says.
But he can still never forgive Nicky Marker for the act of recklessness that, in a splitsecond, robbed him of the chance of what his peers predicted would be a glittering Manchester United career.
Thornley was considered the outstanding talent of United’s famed ‘Class of 92’ – a two-footed winger who had the potential to surpass even his gifted youth-team pals Ryan Giggs, David Beckham, Paul Scholes, Nicky Butt and Gary Neville.
He had already made his first-team debut and, with concerns over Giggs’s fitness, Sir Alex Ferguson had earmarked him for a place in his squad for the FA Cup semi-final against Oldham at Wembley in April 1994.
But a few days before came a fateful reserve outing – at Gigg Lane, in his home town of Bury – when Marker, a journeyman Blackburn defender, left Thornley’s right knee looking like a “bowl of spaghetti Bolognese”. Nothing was ever the same again.
Thornley, now 43, recounts the horrific moment in graphic detail in his autobiography ‘Tackled: The Class of 92 Star Who Never Got To Graduate’.
“I knew he was coming, I could see him coming, but while my left foot, body and arms were moving my right foot wasn’t coming with me yet, I’d planted it on the floor ready to push off,” he writes.
“I couldn’t get out of the way quickly enough. My momentum and the impact of his boot were opposing forces. While the rest of my body was starting to go one way he made sure that my knee went back in the other direction.
“The ball had gone, he had time to pull out, didn’t need to make the tackle – but he wanted to. Nicky Marker will never say, ‘Yes, I meant to do Ben Thornley’, but I blame him 100 per cent. “He was a professional footballer with plenty of experience. He knew exactly what he was doing. The tackle that he put on me was late, it was high and it was calculated. “Some 18-year-old had been giving him the runaround all game so he took it upon himself to dish out retribution. That decision cost me a potential career with the club I love. I will never forgive him for that.” The damage was sickening, with United’s physio at the time, Rob Swire, describing it as the “worst knee injury I’d seen in around 30 years of being a physio”. The irony is Thornley had been given the chance to come off by reserveteam coach Jim Ryan but was enjoying the game so much – in front of Ferguson and his parents – that he opted to stay on.
He later sued Marker and Blackburn for loss of earnings and eventually settled for a payout of about £750,000, but it was no compensation for what he had lost.
It did not finish his career, but he was never the same player again and, according to his brother Rod, who became a masseur at United, was never quite the same “happy person” either.
That he played again was a tribute to the skills of surgeon Jonathan Noble and Thornley’s own determination to come back. He stayed at United on the fringes of the first team for another three and a half years
Knee was like a bowl of spaghetti