Jack Butland relives Rangers blunder against Man Utd as keeper lifts lid on scary injury that landed him in hospital
It took Jack Butland three weeks to overcome the painful dead leg which led to a hasty rush to hospital. But the Rangers keeper admits it’s taken years of experience to get to the point where he can shake off the kind of stinging blows he sustained at Old Trafford.
The former Manchester United stopper was back at the Theatre of Dreams last week as his Light Blues team faced up to his former employers in the Europa League. But it proved to be a return to forget for the Ibrox No1 as his horrid OG blunder gave Rubin Amorim’s side the lead.
Butland, though, refused to let that mistake put him off his game, with the 31-year-old bouncing back to make a number of key saves as Gers came close to snatching a surprise draw before Bruno Fernandes’ heart-breaking winner. And he followed that up with another solid showing a Dundee United on Sunday as Gers claimed a rare away win in the league. The Man Utd gaffe was a bodyblow - but nothing Butland hasn’t dealt with before.
He said: “The life of a keeper is a very unforgiving one. I came away from that game at Old Trafford, one of those where you look back on it and you just think you didn't really put much of a foot wrong.
"You make a lot of saves, you look back on your distribution, the passes I made and the decisions I made, positions I took up and you’re happy.
“But the life of a keeper, it takes one moment and you're the villain immediately. The biggest thing from those games is to look back at it, take from it the facts, take from the realities and for large parts, if not the majority of it, I didn't put a foot wrong.
“You sort of come away shaking your head in disbelief at times, but being a goalkeeper is like that. There's maximum punishment. I look back at that situation and that goal in particular and I look at what I did and what I did was trying to be positive on the front foot, trying to help the team out and I made the right decision to come.
“I just executed it, not in the way that I wanted to. So if you're able to look at it like that, with games coming thick and fast, you can quite easily move on.
“It doesn't mean you forget about it, but you can take comfort in the fact that you were trying to do the right things. As you get older, as you mature, it gets easier to deal with.
“As a young keeper, you think you're never going to make a mistake. You think it's the end of the world when you do. The reality is there's not a goalkeeper alive that's never made a mistake before.
“They happen. What you do have to think about is how they happen, why they happen and if there's any reasons for that.
“The goal goes in, you're in disbelief in that moment, but there was still however long left on the clock and you always know there's an opportunity for your team to get back in it, but you might be called upon again and you've got to do the next thing right.
“I look back on it as something I actually felt like I did after that. Like I said, you can be the hero, the villain or you can be both in the same game and that's just the reality of it.
“You certainly don't care any less the older you get. It still hurts the same, it still bothers you the same, but certainly from a process point of view or a mindset, it becomes easier.
“You don't want them to happen, but sometimes they do and the worst thing you can do is then compound it by not being ready for the next moment.”
Butland will be hoping it is his moment tonight as he looks to help Gers into the last 16 of the Europa League. It will take a major slice of luck if Philippe Clement’s team are to get the win and five results elsewhere that see them into the top eight. But having endured some pretty rotten misfortune on the injury front, the former England stopper is hoping things go his way this time.
Butland missed this month’s Old Firm victory when a run-of-the-mill dead leg developed into a concerning leg bleed just as he was preparing to ring in the New Year. "It's a common injury that I suppose developed into probably the worst-case scenario,” he explained.
“It was a really sudden and unexpected thing, one that thankfully we got on top of very quick. The doctors here and the physios here, as well as the guys at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital, were brilliant on that New Year and made probably a faster and most expected sort of recovery. That's credit to all the guys that have helped out and me doing everything I possibly could to get back as quick as I could.
“It was a recurrence of an injury from five days before, so anyone familiar with a dead leg, it sounds quite innocuous at times, but essentially it's a bleed, an internal bleed, not the life-threatening one that seems to leak around on social media that forced us to have to come out and cover that. But it ended up bleeding and not stopping, so it essentially grew and grew and grew and the pressure on my leg grew.
“My quad at the time was a few jean sizes bigger than what it should have been. So it can get scary at that point, that's why hospital was involved, because if it doesn't stop bleeding, then it goes down the operation route and it's messy. Thankfully it was one that's then quite simple but stubborn to get through.”
