Damien Duff had an amazing career as a professional footballer.
Duffer had a century of caps for his country and nearly four times as many appearances in the Premier League. During his storied career he won two Premier League titles, a League Cup and scored a goal in a World Cup.
He competed at the highest level of the game, but reaching that stage doesn’t come easy. In order to become one of the world’s elite, he had to put in all he hard work on the training ground.
Eventually, all that catches up with you.
“I’m sure Mick doesn’t! ” https://t.co/PIcaBHei9A
— SportsJOE (@SportsJOEdotie) March 29, 2017
It’s easy too look back at Duff’s career wit rose-tinted glasses, particularly from an Irish perspective, but doing so would nearly make you forget about all the injuries he’s experienced throughout the years.
Duffer’s list of injuries is longer than Peter Crouch’s torso, and it’s only when he listed some of them out in his interview with Brian Kerr for the Irish Independent that you realise just how many have had lasting effects on his body.
“There’s a screw in there to keep my left knee together, there’s no tendon in my right foot. I can barely kick a ball with my left foot and know there’s a knee or hip replacement coming down the line.”
“When I wake up in the morning, I can barely move my left knee. It’s the price you pay, I guess.”
Duff admitted that a lot of these knocks could be attributed to overtraining. He was. after all, an absolute workhorse as a player, and he confessed to picking up one of the more debilitating injuries while he was training when he really wasn’t supposed to be.
“I worked too hard in my career. I wasn’t clever with my workload. The day my knee went… that was in training. And it was never the same again. But the thing is, I was meant to be off that day.”
“I’m like a car, I guess. I ran myself into the ground. I remember Jose Mourinho one day telling me to calm down. ‘If you water the flower too much, it’ll die. Go home and rest’ Jose said. He was right, of course. But that was just the way I was. I wanted to be as good as I could be.”
It’s a difficult mentality to change.
