Fulham legend Chris Coleman is a big man. So big, they used to slice the shorts at Fulham FC so that his thighs would not rip them. If anyone had the strength and resolve to overcome a shattering car accident in which his right leg was broken in three places, his knee and ankle splintered and skin torn away, in which it took an hour to cut him from the wreckage and more than a dozen operations and skin grafts to mend him, then it is this colossus of a defender.
Except that sometimes even the strongest bodies admit defeat. For Coleman it came after a pre-season match last year. He had undergone months and months of rehabilitation, had completed the hard yards of summer training. But it was just not the same. He was not the same.
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| Fulham legend Chris Coleman |
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"There was no chance, really," Coleman says. "My ankle is as stiff as a board and I could not jump or turn. The knee was weak because of the ligament damage. I had no chance. No chance at all." He had already confided in his best friend and fellow Wales defender Kit Symons, now at Crystal Palace, who had talked him out of "jacking it in" on several occasions, as had his wife, Belinda. "Kit just said, 'You've come all this way' – but basically I knew it was the end."
Coleman went back to see the surgeons who had operated on him. "They just said to me, 'To be honest with you, Chris, we cannot even believe you are walking normally, never mind playing football. We expected you to be left with a limp for the rest of your life'. I thought, 'Oh well'.
"It was not just one doctor, it was two or three, and they just said, 'You have taken this as far as you can, it is not going to improve any more'. And I thought, 'OK, that is it'."
And that was it. Aged 32. Club captain with 478 League appearances and 32 caps for Wales, a man who believed, prior to the accident, that he was playing the best football of his life. Robbed of two years and now robbed of the rest of his career.
Spool back to 2 January 2001 and Coleman was driving home to his wife and four children along a country road in Surrey. Fulham had surprisingly lost the previous day to Stockport County but were destined to run away with the First Division. Coleman – who had cost the club a then-record £2.1 million – was the heart of the team.
The weather was filthy, freezing, the air full of sleet. Coleman swerved to miss something in the road – a pheasant, he thinks – and lost control of his Jaguar car, smashing into a tree. Coleman came round to the smell of blood, burning rubber and excruciating pain. His mobile phone – flung to the back of the wreckage – was ringing. It was his wife, worried as to why he was late.
He skirts around it now, sitting at Fulham's Motspur Park training ground, but acknowledges that he is "lucky to be alive". "Yes, I know I have missed out on the Premiership with Fulham and I have missed out with Wales, but I have got some great memories of playing against some of the best teams in the world," he says.
In some ways, retirement is a relief. His family is released from being asked on a daily basis: "Will he, won't he, make it?" and Coleman is set on a new course as a coach and, he hopes, eventually a manager.
After the accident, Jean Tigana took the first-team squad to Marseille. There, Coleman was invited round to dinner at the manager's home. "He said that even if I had not had the accident and there wasn't a possibility of me getting back he was going to ask me to come and work with him when I retired," Coleman says.
"I had always had a good relationship with him. I talked to him a lot because I was the captain and he asked me about certain players, players he was thinking about buying." And, so when Coleman eventually announced his retirement in October last year, he joined the coaching staff. He started working with the Under-10s – "Great fun" – but after six weeks he was drafted in to help out with the first team and is now assistant coach. "We were having a bit of a bad time, a bit of a decline, so I think he wanted all hands on deck," Coleman says.
The bad times are here again, with Fulham facing a crucial Premiership game against Aston Villa at Loftus Road. Lose and relegation moves ever closer. And, then next week they face West Brom, again at their new adopted home.
Tigana would love to call on Coleman on the field and "Cooky", as the man from Swansea is known, admits that it is frustrating on the touchline. "I can only describe it as like having both hands tied behind your back. You are in touching distance but all you can do is shout advice – you can't get on there.
"I talked to a lot of former players who are now coaches and they said it took them two or three years before they stopped thinking like a player. For me, I know, I have to stop doing it quicker than that."
He still makes his presence felt in the dressing room, where he is known for his exuberant character. "I just bounce off the boss and Christian [Damiano, the assistant manager]. Whatever they say I come in and give a little bit of advice." To that end it is often Coleman's voice, still, perhaps, thinking as a player, that is heard at half-time.
"The boss says one or two little things, but he is a big believer in the players sorting it out for themselves, so I probably say more at half-time than anyone else." He admits it is also hard for the players to see him as a coach and not a team-mate. "But there is a different role now and it is up to me really to show them the different side of me," he says.
It is not necessarily a different side he expected to show. Coleman says he always wanted to stay in football but has surprised himself with the enthusiasm he now has for coaching and, at some point, managing. "It is daunting, but it excites me at the same time and I think that, probably, my ambition is to have a crack at that," he says.
Coleman is taking his new role very seriously and starts studying for his first coaching badge shortly. He is also taking French lessons to try to help break down the language barriers, and speaks highly of the methods employed by Tigana and Damiano.
Football can be an up-and-down existence, he says, gesturing with his hand like a rollercoaster. No one would argue that Chris Coleman deserves to be on an upward curve.