United physiotherapist Neil Dalton spoke to BBC Radio Cumbria at length on Tuesday evening, the first part of that interview which is reproduced here, Dalton talking about Joe Garner's injury and his own time at the club :
" I've had a good season to be fair but just of late we have run into one or more serious injuries with some of our more influential players as you would say. I can't remember in the past few years as good a season up until the last couple of months that we have had such an injury free season. Unfortunately we have had two or three of late to senior players but we will work hard on those to try to get them back as fit as possible.
" A knee ligament doesn't take months to heal but once a fracture is healed, it is healed. Ligament injuries, you tend to either repair the ligament or reconstruct the ligament, but you have got the surrounding muscle tissue areas around that need mobilised work, strengthened and stretched. Also to support the joint or the ligament that was injured as well, which takes doubly as long as a fracture does to heal.
" Joe (Garner's) was a total reconstruction, the ligament had actually snapped in two. So as with anything, like a tethered rope that snaps the ends of the ligament spring back to where they originate and insert from and there is nothing in the middle. So basically Joe had a total reconstruction to put something in place where the ligament actually was in the first place.
" In Joe's injury two hamstring tendons were taken from the same leg and they were grafted together so you actually have four strands of tendon. They are then put in place through drilling and that sort of thing where the ligament was. So in theory you have got four tendons that are replacing one ligament, so eventually when Joe's muscles and so forth around the knee are strong enough then the ligament will actually be stronger than what it was in the first place.
" On the same day he starts doing certain exercises, straight leg raises, knee braces, plus a range of movement of the knee joint itself is begun within a few hours. Then it is a gradual build-up, you are allowed to do certain things at certain times that are all to do with the graft itself. You've got to have, the first six weeks you have to have what they call closed chain activities where your foot or the body part has to be weight bearing. Then you change into your open chain activities after that which is your leg press and your more advanced activities.
" Dobes (Scott Dobie) is not the biggest of lads anyway, he is 6'2 and there isn't any fat on him at all. For an elite professional athlete to lose that amount of weight in the four or five days that he was actually off work is a vast amount. You are talking close to 10% of his body weight, probably 8% of his body weight. Lummy (Chris Lumsdon) had it earlier on, Lummy actually lost 10lbs earlier in the season, about a month ago, and it took Lummy ten days to recover. "
" Dobes, because of Lummy's experience, we took our time with Dobes and we actually kept him away from the squad, sort of in quarantine, we tried to keep everyone else away from him. We just started building him up with his cardiovascular work. The problem we have got is that when they lose that much weight, is that for him to go and sit on a bike for 20-25 minutes, he gets off and obviously he has been sweating but he is absolutely shattered.
" So for him to start going out and training with the lads for an hour and 45 minutes on a morning and possibly some work on the afternoon, it would just set him back two or three days. So we've had to take our time with Dobes and spend the week where we have just built him up, where he has been working with me.
" In the last couple of days he has actually trained, he has been in since last Tuesday I think he came back from the illness, but we took four of five days just to gradually build him up so we got to that hour - 90 minutes per day training. Then he has been able to train the last couple of days, touch wood with no problems and no fatigues signs or anything. So hopefully he is there and raring to go now for the weekend. I think Lummy ended up being off for about a week or eight days.
" You have just got to build them up and hope that you can feed them back up and get that diet and the nutrition right so that you are hitting them with carbohydrates and proteins and building the system back up so that they are ready to train. Of course, it's about not being too daft and letting them go straight back into it, if you let them go back into a full session you could quite easily put them back for three or four days. You are not doing what is the best for their body, you need to gradually build these things up so that you are not putting the body back to the state that it was in due to the illness or the virus.
" Collectively as a staff with Greg (Abbott) and Dennis (Booth) and the gaffer (John Ward), we spoke about Cleveland (Taylor) in depth. Although he has played half a dozen, eight games now, he is still not up to full fitness. He'll tell you that himself, he is quite open about it, he doesn't feel as strong or as fit as he did last year when he was playing his 40/42 games or whatever he played in the season. So it's just about building that up and taking your time with it, and hopefully we will get Cleveland back to full fitness for the last eight or ten games of the season.
" I think again with Joe, I think that adrenaline took over, you know what Joe is like, if you watch Joe playing he is a tough little cookie, he's battling and he's an all-action type guy. I think in hindsight if you had looked at the injury, because of the mechanics of the injury, where he went over on the knee, his foot was planted, but there was nobody really near him and there was no tackle involved. "
" You could probably say that it was a serious injury at the time but I think that when you get on to a player and he is telling me that it is a little bit sore but he thinks that he'll be OK in a minute or two. He's saying that he just needs to get it moving and he'll be fine, then you tend to go with what they are telling you. If it was serious you would hope that they would let you know straight away, but in hindsight five minutes later he did have to come off.
" I actually joined with the club in about 1986, Harry Gregg signed me all those years ago when I was a schoolboy. When I left school in about 1991 David Wilkes and Aidan McCaffrey took me on as a YTS and I played for around and about three years. I finished in my third year, I had a knee operation, but more to do with probably we had an outstanding youth team at that time and I wasn't good enough. Peter (Hampton) and Mick (Wadsworth) at the time asked me to help with the injuries, carry on playing for the foreseeable future but also to help Pete out and get into this physiotherapist situation.
" Which I was quite interested in at the time, I liked those gory details of all the operations and that sort of thing. It just escalated from there really, I passed my FA exams in around and about 1994/1995 I think it was. Then of course everybody knows the situation with Mr Knighton when he took over and he sacked the whole of the staff, except myself and Dave in and around 1997. I took over as head physiotherapist at the age of 21, which is unfortunately about 11 or 12 years ago now.
" Believe it or not Michael Knighton's company was excellent, I really enjoyed sitting with him on the Friday evenings and having a drink with him. Because he had some fantastic stories about Manchester United and about life in general. Although I don't agree with what happened just before he left the club, he did actually save the club at the start and give us some wonderful times.
" A couple of Wembley appearances, a couple of promotions, that sort of thing. So it was different, and I cannot thank him enough for him putting a little bit of trust in me at the time, albeit it was probably the cheap option to keep me on as head physiotherapist when he sacked Pete, my boss. He did give me that chance though when I was 21 years old.
" It was nasty at the time, I remember standing in front of the Paddock and the amount of flak that was thrown, not personally at myself but at Dave and John (Halpin) at that time. It was pretty hard to deal with and I always felt sorry for those guys, they were doing their best for the club. They were asked to take over, although they didn't even want to do the job, they were trying to help the situation at the club to the best of their ability. It was grim in those days, not a nice place to be working in at that time. "