Season › 2011-12 › News

James McFadden, Scotland & Everton

What is going on with him now?

James McFadden, Scotland and Everton striker.

What's going on with him now? Well, he's trying to get fit, trying to learn the game again, he says. His mind knows what he wants to do but his body hasn't been allowing him to do it. He's at Everton until the summer and who knows after that. Nothing's ruled in and nothing's ruled out. He'd just like to get some game-time before the end of the season.

That's part of a feature in today's Scotsman entitled "James McFadden, Scotland and Everton striker". At least it sheds some light through the mist of silence from official channels that has shrouded the months since he strangely re-joined Everton, ostensibly to provide some much-needed sharp-shooting in Everton's goal-shy strikeforce... or what was left of it after Yakubu, Beckford and Arteta departed last August. More realistically, to occupy the treatment room?

It turns out that McFadden has been on a long and tentative recovery path from a career-threatening knee injury, and last-ditch surgery to repair it back in April of last year. The knee did improve ...

A month passed and the news was better. He'd play again right enough but, when the knee healed, the hamstring went and, when the hamstring was fixed, it was the groin that was the problem. That was a month ago. Felt a twinge in training with Everton and pulled up as a precaution. He was hoping it was nothing but, when your luck is out, it always ends up being something. A tear. Momentum checked. And now here he is on this Thursday afternoon on Merseyside talking about his wretched 18 months, a period that has seen him start the sum total of one game (for Everton against Tamworth in the FA Cup last month) with just two more appearances off the bench. Eighteen months and 77 minutes of football.

The rest of the interview wallows in introspection over more of Scotland's seemingly perennial failures on the football field, but one more paragraph stands out:

"I was definitely trying too hard and it got the better of me. It's not often I can say that, but it definitely did. I wouldn't say I never tracked back [as Levein alleged], but my reaction wasn't great at times when I lost the ball, but it was a reaction of sheer frustration at myself. It wasn't because I was lazy. If you look at my time at Birmingham, that's all I done. Running up and down the line. My football was suffering because all I done was work hard for the team. I would have wanted to talk about it face to face [with Levein], but then I got injured. The frustrating thing for me is that I haven't had a chance to prove everybody wrong.?

To read the full article, click the link below:

Quotes or other material sourced from The Scotsman

---

---

Reader Comments (28)

Note: the following content is not moderated or vetted by the site owners at the time of submission. Comments are the responsibility of the poster. Disclaimer

About these ads