From The Sunday Times:
Two is company, three’s a crowd. The sun shone, the waves lapped and the Caribbean was just like in the brochures. Ole Gunnar Solskjaer and Silje, his long-time partner, had flown there last summer to marry. On honeymoon you want to be left alone, but as the couple walked along the warm sands an unwanted third party was tagging along. Only Solksjaer knew it was there: small word, big presence — pain.
The Manchester United player is too decent a man and loving a husband to have let pain mar his and Silje’s time together, but pain cannot be wished away. So he dealt with it himself. "I thought about it lying on the beach. By the pool. It played on my mind all the time," he says. "Even going for a walk, you’d get a little twinge. There was always a reminder. It played on my mind: ‘Is it going away? Is it going to go away? Will it ever go away?’ It didn’t spoil the honeymoon. But it was always there."
How did Solskjaer get to meet his unwanted companion? He remembers the moment precisely. It was a Wednesday night, August 27, 2003, and the game was nearly over. He was playing for Manchester United against Wolverhampton at Old Trafford. "Long pass from Scholesy to the right wing," he recalls. "The left-back came towards me, I trapped the ball and went to turn inside him. I put my knee down hard . . . and it just happened. I thought, ‘Something’s gone here’, yet it was difficult to believe because it was such a normal situation. How many steps like that do you take on a football field?" Normally an athlete’s thigh muscles help hold the knee in place and absorb stresses, but near the end of the 90 minutes, Solskjaer’s were too fatigued, perhaps, to do the job. Maybe his foot went down at just the wrong angle.
Under pressure, the articular cartilage in his right knee blew a hole, leaving the joint without cushioning and bone to grind against bone. Assuming that he had merely jarred the knee, Solksjaer travelled to Bosnia to play for Norway. "At half-time I couldn’t walk down the dressing-room stairs," he remembers. He had an operation and came back six months later, but as soon as he played, it was there. The pain. "To shoot with my left foot, I’ve got to stamp my right one down hard, and I couldn’t do it. In the back of my knee it would be like a knife in the back of my leg."
"I did a television interview recently and the guy kept talking about Barcelona, blah, blah, blah, and I didn’t know what to say."
Why? "Because it’s in the history books now. I played 10 minutes in that game. That’s all."
He is not being falsely modest. Polite when you meet him, warm and wry once relaxed, there are layers to Solskjaer, but here is the nub of his outlook, the dominant trait of his personality. He is a clear, unsentimental thinker. "Why would you want to live on past glories? You can only look forward," he says.
Looking forward means looking towards the day when there is no pain. He has a vision. He is at Old Trafford, it is late August, perhaps even early September, and he is playing for Manchester United again. Out there, in the soft sunshine of summer’s ending, he is once more twisting, turning, jumping, kicking and running — running free. Pain free. It is 12 months to the day, today, since he last appeared for Manchester United, in the 2004 FA Cup final versus Millwall, and much longer since he scored a goal — against Panathinaikos in September 2003 — but he regards dwelling on such things as wasted energy. He has fought injury for two seasons and had two major operations. We talk for two hours. Not once is there self-pity.
"I’ll sometimes bump into a non- Manchester United supporter," he muses, "and they’ll say, ‘Are you still playing? Are you in the lower leagues?’ One day you’re a hero and the next you’re in the history books. That’s just the way football is."
"I’m missing my football. It’s all inside me waiting to come out. I can feel it so much that I don’t even want to think about the first game. Rome wasn’t built in a day. That’s what Roy always says. He’s been a really good friend to me."
So off Solskjaer goes, off home to Silje, Karna and Noah, off to eat a sensible meal, go early to bed and be 100% ready for Carrington the next day. As his head touches the pillow he will conjure a thought: it is August and he is playing again for Manchester United and there is no pain.
In the Carrington gym he is always bright and sunny, reasoning that he can still contribute to the squad by being a positive presence around the place. Alan Smith and Louis Saha both said working alongside Solskjaer when they were injured earlier in the season helped keep their spirits up. As we speak, on a sofa inside the main training-ground building, Ruud van Nistelrooy and Ryan Giggs walk past and stop for banter. Rod Thornley, the United masseur, appears , to show off his new baby.
"It’s like a family here. I’ve been here nine years and can’t say a bad word about it," Solskjaer says. "The club have been fantastic. Before the operation there were text messages from Keano and phone calls from (chief executive) David Gill and the gaffer. He said, ‘You just make sure you’re ready, whatever it takes, and then come back’."
Ferguson’s caring side is not always projected in the media. "Yeah. What I see in the press is a totally different picture to the one I’ve formed of the man over nine years. If you give him 100%, he’ll give you 100% back. And he’s totally honest with you, all the time. It’s important not to hide things from your players. I’ve knocked on his door so many times with a problem. With the knee, he knows he’s not a doctor, so he just listened, said he would support me and left it for me, Rob Swires (the United physio) and the surgeon to sort it out."
Ferguson invited Solskjaer to travel with the squad to Italy in March for the second leg of Manchester United’s Champions League tie against AC Milan. Knocked out, everyone was raving about the Italian team on the flight home. "The lads were sitting their shaking their heads. Milan were just that little bit better than you normally play against. They had no bad touches on the ball."
What has it been like, sitting powerless and watching his team fall short, not only in Europe but in the Premiership this season? "You look at things differently. I can see all the players, how they act, who’s concerned and who’s not concerned about different things. Who’s always doing their best . . . " And who is not, is the implication.
"When you’re playing you don’t always see these things. It’s very, very interesting."
He agrees with Ferguson that Manchester United are in transition and says: "We’ve been unlucky in that we’ve been on the receiving end of two unbelievable seasons — Arsenal last year and Chelsea this time. So we’ve got it all to do." He is too canny to come right out and say it, but it is clear Solskjaer thinks a little more pride and effort is required from some in the team. "We can win the league next year if everybody pulls in the same direction, thinks about Man United, sticks together. We’re a new team but we’ve all got to know each other now, so fight for your teammate. Give 100%. Commitment’s what’s needed. Everyone can look at themselves in the mirror and . . . a player knows if they’ve been 100% committed. If some, after this season, end up saying, ‘Well, I ’ve not been committed’, that’s something they can learn from. If you are not 100% committed, you’ll end up with f***-all — sorry, that’s a bad word for The Sunday Times. But it’s two years on the trot where we haven’t won the league. Next year we have to make it ours. The fans will be desperate for it to happen. Next year I’m going to show my bouncebackability as a player, and the team will too. Bouncebackability — that shows I’ve been watching too much telly since I’ve been out."
Solkjaer has never played with Wayne Rooney and he is desperate to do so. "He’s Noah’s favourite now — isn’t that hard for a dad to take? I’ve played with some great players here, Cantona, Scholesy, Keano. Now I want to play with Wayne."
He picks out another youngster as key to United’s future, perhaps a surprising name. "Darren Fletcher. When he played his first game for the reserves, I played with him. He was 16 and it was against Everton. It’s great to see him come through and be as good as he now is. He’s the most consistent of the younger players. He doesn’t capture the headlines, he’s got absolutely no personal agendas, he’s not, like, ‘Look, here I am!’ when he’s on the pitch. He just goes out and performs for the team."
He always performed for the team. Before his injury he allowed Ferguson to convert him to a right-sided role and he basked in it. Licensed to utilise his acute reading of the game and roam into the spaces he spotted infield, he was still getting into the box to score goals and create chances. Meanwhile, he was a revelation when asked to perform the more orthodox winger’s tasks of crossing and defending against the opposition full-back. How much better would Ferguson’s 4-2-3-1 of this season have been had Solskjaer been one of the three supporting the main striker? Before the injury, it could be said that he was playing his best-ever football. "Exactly. And that’s something I don’t want to think too much about. I’d just broken into the team, in that I’d had my first season as a first-choice player. The new position took my career away from that super-sub thing. I was really happy because it was a free role. You’re facing goal and you don’t have a defender up your backside out there — I felt very confident. If I can get my fitness back to 100%, I can be that same player. Actually, I can be a better one."
He says this because he believes that before the injury he was still developing as a player. He is 32, but look at the mileage. He is veteran of fewer than 150 Premiership starts. "I only became a professional when I was 22. I’ve played for 10 years but been out for almost two. I was on the bench for all those seasons. I should still be fresh. In footballing terms I’m still young. If I hadn’t got injured, I’d have retired when my contract ends in 2006, but now I’d happily extend it and there wouldn’t be any personal agendas like, ‘I need this money, I want you to sign these players’. I want to coach some day, but in an ideal world I’d keep playing until they dragged me out of the door here. When you’re out you get so much motivation back. I’d been at the stage of thinking things like, ‘My international career — should I quit?’ Now I want to play at the highest level for as long as possible.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/newspaper/0,,2767-1622217_1,00.html