JESSE LINGARD has revealed the depths to which he personally sank as injury blighted his progress at Manchester United.
The midfielder was part of the England squad that thrilled the nation by reaching the 2018 World Cup semi-finals.
But his return to Old Trafford for the 2018-19 season was spoiled by a groin injury he found difficult to shake off.
The problem haunted him for months and Lingard has revealed how it almost led him to think of quitting the game for good.
He wrote in The Players’ Tribune: “I love football. Love it to death. But there were times when I thought, ‘I just can’t do this anymore’.
“In my personal life, I buried myself in my phone. Face glued to screens. You might get a mm-hmm out of me in a conversation, but I wasn’t really listening.
“I was bottling it all up. All these emotions and all this stress.
“It went like that all season and well into the next. In a year and a half, I went from top of the world to as low as I’d ever been.”
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Lingard struggled for playing time well into the 2020-21 season before boss Ole Gunnar Solskjaer agreed to let him move to West Ham on loan.
And the 28-year-old credited the first Covid-19 lockdown in March 2020 with giving him a chance to step back from football for some much-needed rest.
He added: “When lockdown came … it’s weird to say, but despite everything, it was a good thing for me, personally. I had pretty much written myself off.
“Suddenly I got a chance to hit that reset button.”
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Source: Soccer - thesun.co.uk
