Alaria is a clever girl and old enough to understand, Phil Jones says, and he gets a sick feeling just thinking about that day in Hale. He was strolling with his three-year-old daughter, pushing her little sister, Rayah, in the pram. A workman walked past. And the guy suddenly just unloaded. “Hey, Phil . . . You’re shit. You’re shit!”
Alaria turned to look at him. “You know when a little kid will ask you 20 times before you give them the answer?” Jones says. “It was one of them. ‘What is that? Daddy, Daddy, what is that?’
“I got so many emotions: rage, calm down, do I confront him, what do I say to my wife? I froze. In the end another guy walking past said, ‘Phil, leave it. Hey, you’re better than that.’ ”
He did leave it. He was brought up to leave it, reared at Manchester United to leave it. His values are that you get your head down, you do your work, you don’t start thinking you’re special, don’t complain.
So, he has been leaving it all this time. Leaving it through years of abuse on social media (in 2017 he came off every platform, deleting the apps from his phone). Leaving it when talked down by pundits or mocked for his injuries. Leaving it when barracked in the street — Hale was by no means the only time.
Now he is here, over a coffee in south Manchester, opening up, because enough is enough.
The tipping point: Rio Ferdinand, in a podcast, calling him a “waste of time”, who is “taking up a youth player’s position”. Ferdinand painted him as one of those comfort-zone leeches, who just sits there taking the money. This cannot go unchallenged — Jones wants to tell the real story of what has been happening since his most recent appearance for United, in January 2020.
“Listen, the respect I’ve got is enormous. I’ve shared a dressing room with Rio — great professional. Loved playing with him. Great lad, good humour. Learnt so much off him,” Jones begins. “But what he said was poor. Really poor. I’m not into disputes, not into arguments, and if he didn’t know, he didn’t know . . .”
The truth is that Jones, 29, has been fighting the same debilitating injury that put Ole Gunnar Solskjaer out for three years as a player. It is severe meniscal damage, and his is to the lateral meniscus of his right knee. The issue first arose when he was an academy player with Blackburn Rovers and flared up at the start of his second season with United. He was 20, had just been to Euro 2012 with England and was being fêted, with Sir Bobby Charlton comparing him to Duncan Edwards.
He had surgery. Upon coming round, the surgeon bleakly explained that he had removed the meniscus — it was just not reparable. That left Jones with bone crunching against bone inside the joint. Linear movement was always OK but sideways impact often caused pain. Still, things were manageable until 2016, and the start of José Mourinho’s first campaign as United manager. “I’d get swelling after training. You’d lay a ball off and any resistance against the knee was just agony. The merest nudge,” Jones says.
“For years I’d go into games thinking, ‘I shouldn’t really be playing,’ and players would look at me, see the swelling and be thinking, ‘He’s playing here?’ But I love playing and I’ll do anything for United. If I have to play at 60 per cent and know I can get through it, then why not?”
The Covid-19 shutdown offered a chance to rest and rebuild physically, and he worked like a demon, waking early for extra running and gym work before the kids got up. When United resumed training, in May 2020, he was, “in the best shape I’d ever felt as a professional footballer”.
On day two, the squad did a familiar sprint exercise, “strides”. He completed one set “and then just couldn’t run, couldn’t pick my leg up to bend it. I just walked in.
“Everyone was saying, ‘What’s he doing?’ I’d lost my mind completely. I’m thinking, ‘I’m finished, can’t be bothered with all this any more.’ I went straight to the doc and said, ‘Enough’s enough. I’ve had too many anti-inflammatories, too many injections, too many close shaves. I need this sorted.’”
He travelled to Barcelona to visit the world-leading specialist Dr Ramon Cugat. Cugat prescribed injections — and, if unsuccessful, last-resort microfracture surgery. The injections did not work, and so in late August he had the operation. It involves drilling deep holes into the knee to allow an influx of blood, rich in growth factors, which eventually turns into fibrous cartilage.
Rehab included a week in Spain, two months on crutches and time strapped to a machine at home. Covid complicated everything. Travel restrictions delayed his visits to Cugat, adding months to the process, and the hardest bits of rehab coincided with the UK’s second and third lockdowns.
It seemed a long shot that the surgery would actually work. Rayah was a baby, Alaria a toddler, the Joneses were living in a new house and Kaya, his wife, had to do everything, “while I was just hobbling about, not even able to take the kids to the park”.
“It was the lowest I’ve ever been as a human being. I used to come back [from United’s training ground] and be in bits. My head was an absolute mess. I’d be in tears. I’d say to Kaya, ‘I don’t know what to do.’ I remember us both crying.”
He and Kaya met at school in Leyland. “She has kept the ship together while I got my shit together,” he reflects. “I feel guilty because she didn’t deserve having to deal with me every day and then look after the kids.
“There were many times I felt an awful dad. You’re trying to give your kids your energy but you can’t. Listen, you’ve got daughters . . . if your daughter tells you you’re dressing up as a princess, you’re dressing up as a princess . . . but I just wasn’t there, wasn’t present in the moment. I’d be on my phone or miles away.
“I’m not scared of saying any of this. People and footballers, they’ll put on a front that everything’s all right, but you don’t know what’s going on behind closed doors.”
At his lowest came the abuse in the street in Hale and he would just like people to reflect on some of the vitriol footballers get. “In this society we’re living in at the minute, all the racism and stuff that affects mental health — I’d just say be careful. You don’t know how it’s going to affect players: physically, mentally, emotionally. We always go back to the same point: ‘Oh they’re footballers, they should be able to deal with it, they get so much money, have this lavish lifestyle.’ But take all that away, strip all that back and we’re just human beings.
“Listen, my problems are not bigger than the problems someone has to deal with in an office, I know that. But they are problems. Footballers have problems like anybody else, and maybe me talking can help players.”
In the early months of his layoff the training ground was a difficult place. He felt guilty about being out of action again and “so useless, so worthless”. He would ask the physios to arrange later sessions so he did not have to face team-mates asking how he was doing. “All I could say to them was [puts on a small voice] ‘I’m getting there’. When at the back of my mind I’d be thinking, ‘I’m miles off.’ ”
Yet now he really is getting there. After 14 months of graft he was ready to join the start of United’s pre-season training in July. Typical of his luck, he then contracted Covid, delaying his return until the squad went to Scotland for a camp. On August 2 he completed his first full session since before the 2020 lockdown. Team-mates applauded him on to the field.
He has since completed two 90-minute appearances for United’s under-23s, most recently against Brighton & Hove Albion yesterday, and the knee feels incredible. “It feels almost like I’ve started my career again,” he says. “I feel young — not 29 but 25 or 26 — and because I’ve missed so much football I feel I have so much left in me.”
He is “surprised” that Ferdinand claims not to have known he was injured. There are no grudges, but that portrayal of the layabout player just picking up his money cannot go uncontested. “Look, I’m private,” Jones says, “so maybe people don’t understand me, but that’s the total opposite to how I am. I’ve done my absolute utmost. From tablets, to my diet, to setting up my house so that every time I get back from training I’m sitting in recovery boots and have my ice machine ready. Nobody can say, ‘You didn’t do enough.’ ”
As for blocking youngsters’ paths: his contract runs until 2023 and, he says, “I’ll fight for United until someone tells me, ‘Go somewhere else.’”
He has had everything on social media. People have messaged Kaya to say that they hope she dies, or terrible things befall their kids. As individuals and as a couple they are strong enough to brush it off but he worries about young players and would love to do something to help them to deal with abuse. “Players say, ‘I never read stuff,’ and two minutes later they’re on their phone. I’m glad I’m done with that now. It’s hard [to stay off social media] when you’re younger.”
Why does he get abuse? He has 27 England caps, has played in two World Cups and owns a Premier League winners’ medal, while spending a decade at United is an achievement in itself. What is there to mock? “I must be an easy target,” Jones says. “Every footballer has a tag and unfortunately mine is, ‘Let’s have a laugh at him.’
“But — and I say this in the nicest possible way — I know who’ll have the last laugh. I’m proud of my career and when it finishes and I’m enjoying my life — and by the way I’m super fortunate that I’ll be able to do that, because footballers are fortunate — [the keyboard warriors] will still be in their mum’s spare bedroom, sipping Diet Pepsi that’s flat, eating a Pot Noodle, sitting in their boxers, tweeting.”
A welcome lift from ‘unbelievable Fergie’
Phil Jones recalls how a meeting this year with his former boss Sir Alex Ferguson lifted his spirits. “He was just unbelievable for me. I went to the premiere of his film with a few players and he came over, we shook hands and then out of the blue he said, ‘Hey, you were f***ing terrific against Real Madrid away [in 2013]. F***ing marking Ronaldo.’ It just gave me so much confidence.
“To be honest, I didn’t even watch his premiere, I was just sitting there thinking about
his comment, thinking, ‘He remembers it . . . someone of his magnitude remembers that.’”
www.thetimes.co.uk/article/7faeeaec-18bc-11ec-a4b1-45d6202ceafe?shareToken=2038242cd2e82b1e3c51476e23e5dbfe
