It was one of the more gruesome on-pitch moments in recent memory as Luke Shaw burst into the PSV Eindhoven box only to have his second season at Manchester United ended in an instant.
Hector Moreno flew in recklessly and while he won the ball, he also broke Shaw's leg in an incident that clearly had an effect on the Manchester United players that were still out on the pitch.
Almost year later, Luke Shaw sat down to talk about that moment in depth with The Guardian, something he had been putting off but now that he is back and firing on all cylinders in Jose Mourinho's Manchester United team, he has given a very honest take on how he feels about it, and everything that followed.
While Shaw was sympathetic towards Moreno initially, it appears as though those feelings have worn off now that he has had a good look at the tackle.
I partly blame myself.
I’d run into their penalty area and I should have shot with my right foot but I wanted to come inside. I wanted to be on my left foot. And then, obviously, the tackle. I don’t even want to think about the tackle, to be honest. At the time I thought: ‘Give him the benefit of the doubt, it wasn’t actually a bad tackle.’ But the more I’ve seen it since, the more I think: ‘You know, that was actually a really bad challenge.’
To be fair to him, he did come to say sorry. He came to the hospital and I saw him face to face in my room. I was quite sympathetic at the time – ‘Aah, look, you can come in, it’s fine’ – but at the end of the day it was me lying there with a broken leg, and I went through so many bad times since then I did start thinking about it some more. It really annoys me they [Uefa] gave him man of the match. Some people were saying it was a good challenge, others were saying it was a bad challenge. For me, it’s a bad challenge.
He certainly has a point regarding UEFA awarding man of the match to Hector Moreno, and that was something the Man United fans were certainly not happy about in the days that followed, but another thing that became a point of debate was Shaw's tweet just moments after he left the pitch.
The England international also explained his reasoning for that tweet, and it's entirely understandable:
I was in shock, to be honest. The pain came later. I was just so upset because I knew I was going to be out for so long. You might have seen the picture where I had a tear coming down my face. They took me back to the dressing room and it was weird because at the start it didn’t hurt as much as I thought it would have. I remember getting my phone, texting my mum and tweeting everyone. It sounds mad, I know, but my leg was broken and I didn’t know what to do. I thought: ‘I’ve got to do something.
Then, that night, lying in hospital, I swear to God the pain was something else. Oh God, the worst you could ever imagine. My mum was next to me and I remember saying to her: ‘They have to do something because I actually can’t keep going with this amount of pain.’ They had to open up my leg to pull out all the clotted-up blood. They put me to sleep, but it didn’t stop the pain when I woke up again.
It sounds like a truly awful experience.
It's fantastic to see him back on the pitch, and playing as if nothing had happened as he has started the season under Mourinho by showing United fans exactly what they were missing last season with his aggressive runs from deep and remarkable work-rate.
It seems crazy that in a summer with so much fan-fare about the signings of Angel Di Maria and Radamel Falcao, a left-back turned out to be the best piece of business done, but Shaw has shown all the qualities to suggest that the left-back spot at Old Trafford is his for the forseeable future.
