CHRIS DUNLAVY

Our resident expert laments the injury agony of Bradley Dack

IT TAKES a lot to upset the gnarled and phlegmatic figure of Tony Mowbray. The manager of Blackburn Rovers has seen much to engender perspective, within football and without. But as the bleak realisation hit home that Bradley Dack had torn his anterior cruciate ligament for the second time in 15 months during last Friday’s 1-0 defeat to Brentford, the 57-yearold looked close to tears.

Dack, the “street footballer” who seemed destined for the Premier League, returned from his first rupture only in December.

In his absence, Blackburn found a new formation. A new form of potency. Even a new talisman in Adam Armstrong.

Mischief

Nobody, though, replaced Dack’s sense of mischief and adventure; the feeling that when he got the ball, something - anything - could happen. His comeback, midway through a campaign that had largely fizzled out, was like an injection of adrenaline.

Now, there is only the hollow cold of a comedown, made all the more sickening for the sheer bad luck of what transpired.

Secondary ACL injuries are relatively common, and it is a misconception to ascribe a rupture in the opposite knee - as Dack has suffered - to misfortune.

Various studies have shown that an athlete who sustains a rupture in one knee and then returns to competitive sport is up to 30 per cent more likely than a previously uninjured athlete to sustain a second rupture - with the opposite knee at slightly greater risk.

“We think what happens is that you don’t get all the strength back in the muscles around your knee and around your hip,” says Dr David Geier, a sports medicine specialist. “So you don’t land equally, you don’t push off equally, you depend more on the good knee and it’s therefore more likely to give.”

Dack, however, was unfortunate. There was no push off. No landing. The 27-year-old tried to sneak up behind Brentford keeper David Raya, who panicked and threw his body weight against the striker. Crushed by 13 stones of muscle, Dack’s only planted knee had nowhere to go. It was, in the language of Formula One, a racing incident.

Initial claims for a penalty quickly faded as Dack remained prone. Those in attendance say they have never seen Mowbray sound more emotional in a postmatch press conference.

Such anguish is unsurprising, and not just because Rovers are struggling. Mowbray has watched Dack battle through rehab, witnessed his boyish excitement at returning to training. On a deeper level, the Celtic boss also loves what Dack represents.

Despite the celebrity trappings - Dack is the co-star of a reality TV show - Mowbray cherishes his playmaker as the antithesis of careerist modern footballers. A maverick. A oneoff. A throwback born of back lanes and mud baths, driven by the sheer delight of kicking a ball around and untainted by the strictures of formal coaching.

“He’s like a kid in a playground,” Mowbray once said. “He wants the ball, he wants to play nutmegs, he wants to shoot from distance and create chances. He wants to scrap and fight and run around. He’s just a joy to work with, every single day.”

To watch Dack is to imagine how we ourselves would love to play; a budget Gianfranco Zola, Paul Gascoigne or Matt Le Tissier.

Qualities

So rare are those qualities now that in 2019, before injury struck, Dack was courted by eight clubs, including Leicester, Newcastle and West Ham. West Brom had a £15m offer rejected.

In a different world, he might even be tussling with Jack Grealish and James Maddison for a place at the Euros.

Now? Dack is far from finished. Callum Wilson, the Newcastle striker, suffered identical injuries in an identical timeframe and bounced back to finish ninth in the Premier League scoring charts.

Wilson, though, was two years younger. By the time Dack returns, he will be several months past his 28th birthday, the suitors will be gone and all of us - not just Blackburn fans - will have been deprived of watching the peak years of a vanishingly rare talent. However optimistic your outlook, that is a deeply sad situation, as Mowbray’s naked emotion betrayed.