FORMER BOHEMIANS WINGER Danny Grant has opened up on his injury nightmare since moving to Huddersfield Town at the start of the year. 

Grant joined the Championship club in January but has yet to make a first-team appearance, and as he explained to the club’s in-house media channel, he has endured a nightmare spell of injury and illness. 

Grant tore his right hamstring shortly after arriving at the club, and having worked his way back to fitness, almost immediately tore the hamstring in his other leg. 

“I joined the club in January and I knew there would be an adaptation period and the training methods would be intense and all these kind of things that I was notified of before I joined”, Grant told the club’s in-house change. 

“Unfortunately in my first week I tore the tendon in my right hamstring. It was a big tear, a 10 centimetre tear.

“It [had been] a positive week and then there was the cup game against Plymouth and I would have been involved in that, so I literally would have been straight in and that would have been the dream – go straight in, get involved and hopefully play some minutes in that game.

“The first week of training went well and it was the day before the game I went to cross the ball and got a big massive tear in my hamstring.

“We knew it’d be a while, maybe eight to 12 weeks, and it worked out at around ten weeks so as expected. Then I came back and was doing all my rehab work and felt I was in a good place.

“I needed some match minutes in my legs so I was playing for the B team trying to get match fit and got another hamstring injury which was just a freak thing to be fair, it was just freak accident. I basically ran past a defender and he didn’t want to run with me so he just tripped me up basically!

“I went forward and when I spoke to the physios about it they said it’s a vulnerable position for your hamstring to be in, stretching forward running at full pace, and I tore my other hamstring in the opposite leg.”

Grant returned early to pre-season to continue his recovery from  the second hamstring injury..and then caught Covid. 

“I came back two weeks early for pre-season and spoke to the physios about both of my injuries.

“They both kind of said me ‘you’re probably best off coming back a couple of weeks early trying to get ahead because you’ve missed so much football’.

“So I came back two weeks early with the B team and felt really good to be fair, doing conditioning and training and that.

“And then when the first two lads actually came back after the breakaway ended up catching Covid.

“It hit me quite hard you know? The first week or so I was quite sick, and then even when I tried to come back after that the club obviously wanted to make sure that you know all the protocols were in place and that there was no problem.

“So we arranged the tests to make sure there was no problems and it came back there was some inflammation around heart and blood, so I couldn’t actually come back into training.

“That prolonged the process so I ended up missing probably the most important four or five weeks of pre-season missed all the pre-season games.”

Grant is still working his way back to full fitness and hasn’t been given a date for his return to action, and thanked his family and the club for their support through what he describes as “one of the toughest periods of my life.”

“I’ve never had tough periods, I’ve always been a happy jolly kind of guy.

“And then coming here during the pandemic, coming from Ireland, especially – it’s a real community country, everyone knows you, you walk down the street and you’ll rarely meet someone that you wouldn’t say hello to.

“England’s obviously a massive country, you can’t know everyone, so it’s a different kind of culture I suppose.

“Being alone, family not really being able to come over in the first six months, or so…it was really difficult, and lonely is probably a good word to describe the first couple of months that I moved here. 

“I’m more well-off in terms of my life than a lot of people around the world so I suppose gratitude and being grateful for what I am.

“There’s a lot of people well more as far as less well after me and around the world, so you keep staying grateful, staying positive, watching motivational videos, podcasts try and keep yourself going – just little things that can kind of change your mindset on days when you’re not feeling too good.

“Then obviously my family to be fair, even though they couldn’t come over, they were always supporting me. I have a really supportive family and the club helped me out as well and made sure that you know there was there was support there if I ever needed it.”