'He was a mess' - the road back from injury hell

“I was walking around the house backwards on crutches because I couldn't go forward."

A professional footballer's livelihood relies on them staying fit.

Competition for starting places is tough and careers can be fleeting.

Stockport County right-back Macauley Southam-Hales knows this all too well, having suffered a career-threatening knee injury on 3 February 2024.

Nine months later he returned, but the journey back to the first team was tough.

The 28-year-old recounted his path from the operating table and back to the pitch as part of BBC Radio Manchester's Road To Recovery series.

Like many footballers in a sport where injury is an occupational hazard, Cardiff-born Southam-Hales has been no stranger to the treatment table since he ed Stockport from Fleetwood Town in 2020.

He collided headfirst with an advertising board during an FA Cup tie in November 2022 and then missed much of the rest of that season with a broken foot.

But both of those misfortunes paled into comparison with what was to come on 3 February 2024.

Southam-Hales had ed his seventh assist of the season in what would end up a 1-1 draw with Harrogate Town when his painful ordeal began.

What first seemed innocuous - as is so often the case with serious injuries - was much more concerning and came after Southam-Hales lost possession of the ball and went down as he strove to recover.

"As I looked down, my kneecap was sort of misplaced, but then it had moved back. I thought my kneecap had sort of dislocated and went back in," he said.

"I'm not in pain, so I think to myself nothing bad will have happened, but then as I went to bend my leg, a big separation had happened where my kneecap had flown up to the top of my quad.

"It caused a big hole through the middle where I could put my finger straight down, which is quite gruesome."

With that, his season was over, and a strained trip to the hospital followed, during which the reality of the situation began to sink in.

"Instantly my heart just dropped, and then I saw him punch the floor, and I said this isn't good," Southam-Hales' wife, Daena, added.

"He was a mess. I've never seen him like that before. He was apologising to me and his mum. His head was all over the place as well. He was crying, trying to explain what's going on all at once, and when the pain kicked in, he started screaming.

"There's nothing you can do to help. I just said, 'stop apologising; you just need to figure out what's going on.'"

Southam-Hales had ruptured his patella tendon. A serious and career-threatening knee injury, ruling him out for between six to nine months.

"The specialist came in and told me the full breakdown and how bad it is and then he gave me some crutches. It's funny when I think of it now, but at the time it was so weird what happened," he recounted.

"He put the crutches on the floor and said, 'Now move and try and use them', and my foot was cemented to the floor. I had no connection to the bottom half of my leg; it was just like a dead weight on the floor.

"With crutches, you've got to try and put your leg forward because that mechanism is dependent on it. But I just couldn't do it, and my leg just kept going backwards and I said, 'What's going on here">