Crippling pain shoots through my right ankle. Pain like I have never experienced before in my life. Rising fear replaces the adrenaline surging around my body. One second focusing on scoring a goal, the next trying to avoid looking down at my shattered ankle and the anxious faces of Wolston’s medical staff and team mates crowding around me.

I know what the boys are thinking.

Counting their blessings it’s me and not them lying there on the turf.

Dad kisses my forehead in the ambulance as paramedics fit the oxygen mask. Mum cries by my hospital bedside a few hours later after I come round from surgery.

Doctors can repair shattered bones and ligaments, but what about the numbness of missing the thing you love? The thing you’ve done everyday for the previous eleven years of your life.

Playing with a sponge ball in the living room, weaving in and out of cushions, turning the sofa into AC Milan’s famous defence for one night, playing with mates in the park, school teams in cup finals, Wolston Rovers in that famous sky blue kit.

Life becomes one endless battle to rebuild my shattered right leg. Weeks on crutches, rehab sessions with club physios and specialists.

Mum and Dad learning the art of walking on eggshells around a timebomb in their midst. Offers of help met with anger and resentment.

It was monotonous. I hated my world and everything in it, from the physical torture to those dark thoughts and black moods. The self-doubt and the sick sensation my dream was over.

Now here I am. 12 months later having to play the game of my life. Eight years in Wolston’s academy and it all comes down to the next 90 minutes.

Not that it should have, you understand. No way. I’d been cruising towards that scholarship contract and a giant step towards the big time ever since Rovers first spotted me.

Mighty Rovers. My club, Dad’s club. The team I first fell in love with when he took me to watch them play Liverpool as a five-year-old. If I close my eyes I’m back there again. Holding his hand tightly as we weave between the crowds, squeeze through the turnstile to climb those steep steps that seemed to go on forever towards the back of the West Stand.

And there it is. That first sight of the lush football pitch bathed in brilliant sunshine. The most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. It still is, even now at 16. Wolston’s home is like a drug to me and I’m hooked.

‘David, for the last time will you get in the car.’

‘Don’t panic, Dad, we’ve got plenty of time. Bopper told us to report to The Lodge for one.’

I slam the passenger door shut and pull the headphones over my ears. I’m in no mood for Dad’s pre-match pep talk today.

What does Bop always say?

Get yourself mentally right, visualise your runs into channels, springing their offside trap, outwitting their keeper. Now repeat the mantra. Focus. Focus.

Bopper French. Wolston’s Under-16s coach. The man guiding Rovers to the brink of an academy league title. The same man who carried me off the pitch last March screaming in agony.

Bop is more than a football coach. He’s a mentor.

‘Look Shawsy, I believe in you,’ I remember him saying after one more average display during my comeback from injury. ‘The other coaches believe in you, your team mates still believe in you.’

‘My confidence’s shot to bits, Bop.’

‘You’re the most natural goalscorer we’ve got here in the academy. You don’t lose that, injury or no injury. You have to give your body time to adjust, get minutes under your belt. Find your match sharpness.’

Five games without a goal. I’d never fired so many blanks in a row. My brain was sharp as ever, I knew what I had to do and where I needed to be on a pitch, but the signals just weren’t getting through to the rest of my body or my wrecked right ankle.

I’ve never been a streaky striker. I didn’t run hot and cold before my world was turned upside down.

The tears and the tantrums start again, rows with my old man over the littlest things, constant atmospheres at home as my dream slipped away.

I know the numbers. All the lads know the numbers. Wolston recruit eight or nine first year scholars each summer. By my age, clubs were on the look out for players from all over, and I mean home and abroad, so what chance a striker with a dodgy ankle who had lost a yard of pace and couldn’t score goals anymore?

You know as well as I do.

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