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"It would have been much cruder" - John Giles on medical situation for players in his day

On Tuesday night's show, we got the take of former Ireland midfielder Steven Reid and Professor J...



"It would have been much c...
Soccer

"It would have been much cruder" - John Giles on medical situation for players in his day

On Tuesday night's show, we got the take of former Ireland midfielder Steven Reid and Professor John Brewer on the use of painkillers in football and the toll it can take on players' bodies.

One current Liverpool defender (Dejan Lovren) and one former (Daniel Agger) have spoken of their own experiences of trying to get through the pain barrier to make it out onto the field. 

That's coming at a much more advanced time for medicine, pain relief and injury treatment. Certainly more than when John Giles was playing with Leeds United in the 1970s.

He joined us as always on a Thursday and gave us an insight into how pain was dealt with in the football sphere at the time, describing "the medical situation wouldn't be as good as it is today and would have been much cruder in those days".

"In my day, there was more pressure actually on the players to play injured than there is today because first of all the squads were smaller," he said, recalling a conversation with his ex-Leeds manager Don Revie when he had a hamstring problem.

"I was having trouble with my hamstring and Don said, 'I want you to play tomorrow'. And I said, 'I don't think I'll be able to. I'll be able to play but I won't be able to play as well as I can play'. He was getting very, very aggressive about it and I knew I wasn't right to play."

He added that there was pressure on managers like Revie at the time, pointing out that the Leeds' legendary manager was "really annoyed" by the refusal to play.

On the wider treatments available in that era, John continued: "There were needles going around in those days that nobody knew what they were.

"But we had a very, very bad experience, I think it was in 1974 when we were going for the league title and Mick Jones who was a big centre forward for us and a very lovely lad and he played and he was getting injections for the last eight matches I think and he never played again. It actually finished him. So that's how serious it could be." 

But John added that he himself didn't go down the painkiller route during any periods when he was impacted by injuries.

"I never took an injection to play," he said.  


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