Coach Steven Reid’s the man to get Scotland’s wounded back on right track

Steven Reid is the ideal man to help inspire Scotland’s injured stars through their rehabilitation.

National coach Steve Clarke’s No. 2 famously once played for 45 minutes against Arsenal at the Emirates with a broken leg.

Less startling, yet more impressively, he also made a nonsense of suggestions from Giovanni Trapattoni he might be finished by going on to play for another five years.

And with Clarke desperate to have John McGinn, as well as Scott McTominay, available for the Euro 2020 play-offs in March, he is nothing if not keen to do his bit.

“I’ve messaged John quite a lot,” said the 38-year-old former Republic of Ireland midfielder.

“His looks a more serious injury, I’ve been touching base with him – sometimes just for a ‘How are you doing?’. At some stage I will get up to the Midlands to see how he is.

“I had quite a few injuries myself, so it touches a nerve with me a little bit when I see lads getting injured, making sure that the contact is there and making sure the rehab is going well.

“Fingers crossed. We will see how his rehab goes, I’m not sure how long it is going to be. But it would be brilliant if it was a speedy one, but who knows?

“Even if he wasn’t going to be involved, if it took a bit longer, I think that if you still touch base, if you are showing that you care about him, then that can go a long way to creating a good spirit and good environment in the squad.

“You’re not just injured and forgotten about.”

Which, as he explained, was a feeling Reid experienced sharply as a player.

“When Trapattoni was the Republic manager, he questioned whether I was actually going to get back to playing at the top level again,” said Reid.

“I had a big operation in Colorado at Dr Richard Steadman’s, on my cartilage. I was out for 11 months and whether it was a language barrier or not, it still came out to question if I would ever get back to playing top-level football.

“I heard about it through the club, Blackburn and I had no contact from anyone in the set-up at that time.

“His English wasn’t great, but you’d like to think there were staff on the media teams, or whatever, briefing managers and coaches on injuries and circumstances – or it might have been a start to actually ask me how I was doing.

“When you have those sort of injuries – that meant missing two years out of three – during a spell at Blackburn you kind of get to know how you want to be treated when you are injured.

“Some managers don’t go in the physio room. Some managers don’t really want injured players around, thinking it affects the spirit or mood in the camp.

“Others, like Roy Hodgson at Palace, are in the physio room every morning.

“I worked with him for a year. He’s checking before he goes out on the training pitch on the injured players.

“That can go a long way because you can easily feel you’re being forgotten about while you are missing for such a long time and doing individual gym work at half-eight in the morning when no one is around.”

Reid never had that feeling under Clarke, his boss at West Brom.

“A lot of the time now when players are injured they hide behind the doctor or the physio. But I used to go in to see the gaffer and tell him how bad the knee was that morning,” said Reid.

“I’d tell him, I can’t train, my knee is really struggling, and I think he appreciated that honesty. He could see I was struggling with injuries.

“There were a couple of times I went and said, ‘That’s me done, you can let them know in your press conference this afternoon’ and he’d talk me down again and probably wheel me out the following week!

“So we just built a decent relationship.

“The game with the broken leg, Boaz Myhill, our keeper, cleaned me out at a corner.

“I had given a given a penalty away and didn’t want to come off because it looks like you are bottling it, so I stayed on the pitch.

“And we did have a Christmas do after the game, so I had to make sure I was there!

“It is quite scary that you can play through it. When I finished playing, I looked it and thought: ‘Wow’.

“It is not something I would recommend, because by the Sunday I was certainly hobbling around London.”