EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW

YOU would think Leonid Slutsky would regret answering his door to the distressed young girl whose cat was stuck up a tree.

For what followed changed the life and destiny of an 18-year-old who was making his way as a goalkeeper in the Russian second division.

‘I was very polite, I couldn’t say no,’ Hull City’s coach recalls of that winter’s day in Volgograd in 1989. Slutsky — the son of a boxer — hauled himself up the poplar but slipped and fell from 20 feet.

‘Now, it is very funny, but not so back then,’ he says. ‘My left knee broke in 1,000 pieces — like glass.’

Knocked unconscious, the last thing Slutsky saw was the ground. For the next three months, however, the only thing he had to focus on was the ceiling of a Soviet state hospital.

When Slutsky looks back on the year he spent in a room with 40 other patients, it is the only time during our conversation that his goofy and infectious smile fades.

So does he regret answering the door to his neighbour, a girl called Victoria whose wedding he would later attend and whose parents bought a television set so Slutsky could watch football from his hospital bed?

‘When I think, “Could I go back and live through that year in hospital?” the answer is no, I would rather die,’ he starts. ‘For three months I lay on my back, I couldn’t stand up, I couldn’t go to the toilet.

‘But now I like to use the expression, “What doesn’t kill me makes me stronger”. The doctor told me I would be an invalid, that I would never be able to walk normally — but I did. I was very positive.

‘When I tried to recover, my knee would bend one millimetre more every day. For me, that was an unbelievable success — it was like winning the World Cup! One millimetre, one millimetre...

‘I survived and I changed my focus. So on that day a footballer died, but a coach was born.’

With the help of his mother — his father died of cancer when Slutsky was six years old — the young man placed adverts in old Soviet tower blocks in the hope of attracting players to his junior team, Olimpia.

Not that Lyudmila — a single mother juggling two jobs — approved of her only child’s career choice, especially given his academic excellence.

‘I finished school with a gold medal and in Russia that opens up every university without the need for an exam,’ he explains.

‘But I decided to study coaching and physical education. It was an unbelievable shock for my mother. She said I could be anything — a lawyer, a journalist — but not a coach! We had a serious fight — and I won.’