Reply With QuoteGreg Tansey: From the biggest move of his career to depression, painkiller addiction and retirement at 30
Greg Tansey woke up, alone, with blood over his stomach. He remembers the scene vividly.
“It went everywhere and stained my mattress.”
It was hours after the Liverpool-born midfielder, who had recently signed for Scottish top-flight side Aberdeen, had undergone routine surgery to fix a hernia on his right side, a common groin injury among players.
Athletes often make a full recovery in a few weeks after surgery — something Tansey knew having gone under the knife for a left-sided hernia while playing for Stevenage, then in the English third division, in the spring of 2013.
He was on a bike three days after that surgery and running again eight days later. A few hours after this operation, in September 2017, however, things were very different.
“I jumped in the shower then rang the physio and said, ‘It’s ****ing leaking here’,” he tells The Athletic. “They had a look at it, but it seemed fine.”
He put it to the back of his mind, doing extra runs and gym sessions to speed up his return, but he noticed sharp, stabbing pains. Rest helped but he found that playing whipped passes caused him particular anguish and it hurt so much it also prevented him from turning freely.
“It felt like something metal was sticking into me,” says Tansey. “I told the physio, but they naturally thought it was just a bit of muscle bruising or something like that.
“I thought, ‘Sound!’, got my head down and battled through it.”
Being at a new club and desperate to impress, Tansey admits he felt like he needed to push through the pain.
This was a player who had helped Inverness Caledonian Thistle win the Scottish Cup for the first time in club history in 2015 and had been brought to Aberdeen by manager Derek McInnes to replace Rangers-bound Ryan Jack, such was his ability.
Little did they know that he would be reduced to a shadow of his former self within a month of joining. After that hernia surgery came a spiral of mental ill-health, drug addiction, and, ultimately, the premature ending of his playing career.
He underwent four procedures within a year as his body repeatedly broke down. Tansey feared managers may be sceptical of his complaints and think the pressure was getting to him. He was secretly self-medicating with more and more painkillers to keep playing.
By September of last year, he was going through a medical to get his pension rather than his next big move.
November 29, 2017. Aberdeen have been beaten 3-0 by Rangers at Ibrox.
Tansey was taking diclofenac, a strong painkiller and anti-inflammatory medication typically used to relieve arthritis symptoms, to knock the pain down from an “eight out of 10” to a “manageable four” to play.
Even that could not dull his suffering during the warm-up that Wednesday night, though. Tansey gave away a sloppy early penalty and failed to track his runner for Rangers’ second goal 20 minutes later.
“It still haunts me. I couldn’t move,” he says. “I was a yard off it. Easily a yard off it. I knew I wasn’t doing myself any justice. I remember just taking a corner and rather than whipping it, I just floated it in because I couldn’t cut across my body.
“The gaffer is going mad at me like, ‘What the ****’s up with you?’,” Tansey says. “After 35 to 40 minutes, I’ve just gone, I can’t go on anymore.”
He was substituted before half-time.
A trip to a supermarket the next morning put things into perspective.
“I was walking around literally hunched over, because if I stood up straight it was worse. This old woman, probably the age of my nan, overtook me. She looked back and went, ‘You all right?’. I went, ‘Nah, I’m not’. She started laughing, and so did I.”
When Tansey arrived at training, McInnes called him into his office to ask why his movement was so limited.
“He started showing me videos of when I used to be at Inverness saying, ‘This is what I want from you’. I was like, ‘I know what you ****ing want, (but) I can barely walk’.
“I don’t think he believed me at first. I even tried to train that morning to piss him off. I couldn’t kick a ball.”
Aberdeen decided to send Tansey back to the surgeon who had performed his hernia op to try to find out the source of his pain. It was determined he had chronic osteitis pubis, an inflammation of the pelvis.
A steroid injection was used to target his pelvic bone, which ruled him out for six weeks. With his family and girlfriend back in Liverpool, he became increasingly isolated at home. For days, his only company would be podcasts by Joe Rogan, an American comedian and former UFC commentator.
“I was depressed. I wasn’t well at all,” Tansey says. “Looking back, it was a poisonous environment because I was on my own.”
Social media abuse did not help, with trolls targeting Tansey, who managed 14 appearances in his first six months at Pittodrie.
“I was getting tweets saying they had seen me out in Aberdeen drinking, that I had a drink problem and that’s why I wasn’t playing. One said, ‘Are you still alive? I’ve heard he’s ****ing dead!’,” Tansey adds.
“I can take stick, but at that time I’d stay off Twitter because I wasn’t in a mental space to deal with that.
“I lived in a tiny village called Inverurie — there’s nowhere to go anyway if you wanted to have a bevvy. I didn’t have that sort of temptation.”
During the January 2018 transfer window, he was told he was being sent on loan to Ross County — bottom of the Premiership under manager Owen Coyle.
“Bear in mind I’d just been on a physio bed the day before, nowhere near being fit. So I did a fitness test on a field on my own, checking it out, seeing if I was all right. There was still a bit of pain there but I thought, ‘**** it, I just need to go’.
“Halfway through the second training session, I had to stop — it was killing me. The gaffer said, ‘You’re starting on Saturday’. I was like, ‘It’s not that’.”
Did another manager think his injuries were more mental than physical?
“That’s what I was worrying about,” Tansey says. “I went back into the physio but I was lower than a snake’s belly. I was almost in tears with it, because at that point I was sick of feeling people didn’t believe or trust me.”
Reflecting on that time, Coyle says the club had to respect what Tansey was saying about his injury, adding: “He was so unlucky because he could play — my god, he could play. We’d have wanted him playing but it’s fair to say nobody knows their body better than the player themselves. He’s a good lad and I wish him nothing but the best.”
With recurring pain in his left groin, the side he’d had surgery on five years before, it was decided Tansey should travel south to Leicester to see Professor David Lloyd, who operated on Jamie Vardy this year, helping the Leicester City and former England striker to return to action eight days after hernia surgery in January.
There was heavy scarring on his left inguinal ligament, so he underwent a “Lloyd release” — a procedure named after the professor’s pioneering surgery.
On the right side — where he had been operated on at Aberdeen — Lloyd noted that the mesh inserted to support the damaged area “looked absolutely fine but was lying in a very high position and this may mean that he would be at risk of developing a recurrent hernia”.
Ross County physio Kevin Bain looked after Tansey’s rehab and kept contemporaneous notes of the player’s mood, treatment and recovery plans.
“I genuinely believed he would be able to get back,” Bain says. “I feel for him. I can’t speak highly enough of Greg as a person.
“He’s one of the most motivated people I’ve come across in the game. He was desperate to get back and fit and contribute something.”
Six weeks into his loan period, Tansey had recovered to the point he could make his full debut for Ross County against St Johnstone in late February.
“I had one training session where I thought to myself, ‘I’m ****ing back here’,” Tansey says. “I wasn’t meant to start (the next game) but the gaffer saw it and said, ‘You’re starting’.
“But halfway through the game, I’m in agony again — pain from moving.”
He came off after 60 minutes and in March 2018, was sent back to Professor Lloyd, who removed the previous mesh, replacing it lower down.
“I woke up afterwards and David came in and said, ‘Hopefully, you’re going to be all right now’.”
Tansey had essentially been trying to play top-flight football for six months with a hernia — at times, two of them.
“That’s why you couldn’t move,” he remembers the physio telling him.
Managers Coyle and McInnes called to speak to him post-surgery after being told of the true extent of his condition.
“I was made aware how much he was still struggling,” McInnes says. “I was a player who suffered a lot of injuries. I had a career-threatening injury at 19, so I know what it’s like to have that doubt if you’re actually going to be able to perform and do the job that you love.
“If there was any frustration aimed from me towards Greg about his level of performance that’s only because I knew what he was capable of. What we didn’t know at the time was the injury was probably bearing more heavily on him than maybe he was letting on.
“When you look back at what he was having to deal with, there’s an understanding there that it was impossible for him to be at his best.
“It’s just really sad. Greg was always very professional, very diligent, very eager. I really liked him, and he deserved better.”
Tansey appreciated the conversation.
“The main thing is that he knew I wasn’t a coward because that’s not me at all.”
Back at Aberdeen the following pre-season, Tansey was determined to go to any lengths to prove his worth.
He took suppositories to numb the pain, “just to get through it”, but his left hip seized up within days and he was left “walking like someone with a fake leg, limping around everywhere”.
“That was the first time I thought about retiring,” he says.
Originally Posted by mondo_notion
