I”ll walk back to the spot and have ‘bit of a moment’
ROB’S LONG ROAD BACK
ROB HOLDING says tonight he plans to walk to the very spot on the Old Trafford pitch where his career was derailed nine months ago and give thanks that he is still playing.
It was at Old Trafford where an innocent collision with Marcus Rashford last December saw the Arsenal defender rupture cruciate ligaments in his left knee, ruling him out of action until this week.
Holding made his comeback in last Tuesday’s Carabao Cup win over Nottingham Forest and is in line for his first league game since that dreadful night.
He said: “It will be coming full circle for me. Even if I am on the bench it will be brilliant to just walk back to that spot that it happened and take it in and have a bit of a moment.
“It is a bit of closure for it to happen there and then your first game involved is back there.
“I genuinely just thought it was a bit of knee-on-knee contact and a bit of a bump at the time. I was like, ‘Ah, I’ve got a bit of a crack on my knee there, that’s a bit sore’. It wasn’t until I tried to put weight on it and it gave way again that I realised it was something serious.
“I was having my first long-term run in the team at the time, so it couldn’t have happened at a worse time.”
Alongside Holding as he made his comeback last week was Hector Bellerin, who picked up the same injury a month later and endured the same long fight back to fitness.
Holding said he was in tears when he saw the Spaniard injured against Chelsea in January. “I was two weeks post-op when he went down,” he said. “It was really emotional to see him go down. I cried. I thought, ‘Oh, no’, because it was so raw for me.”
“The long days in the gym have been dark times. It happened so close together, for it to both be left knee as well. To go through the process with him made it a lot easier.”
Gunners boss Unai Emery has denied there is a language barrier with his players – but rates his English only six out of 10.Winger Bukayo Saka said he had assistant Freddie Ljungberg translate some of Emery’s instructions because he could not understand the manager.
But asked if there was a language problem, Emery said: “I think no. I have conversations with players, particularly individually with Bukayo Saka.
“Sometimes I use Freddie to do that conversation with individual players. But I also spoke to Saka alone in my office and prepared some videos.
“Now my English is, from one to 10, maybe a six. But at six, I think the players can understand
me.”