Manchester United defender Tyrell Malacia felt like "s***" during his recovery from two operations on his knee but has insisted he remained positive throughout the lengthy process.
The Manchester Evening News were the first outlet to reveal why Malacia had been absent last year, revealing he'd undergone knee surgery after weeks of speculation from fans.
Malacia sustained the knee at the end of the 2022/23 season and the club initially looked to manage it with pain injections, but surgery was deemed necessary. He spent some time in the Netherlands to recover but eventually required another operation on the same knee.
The defender last played for the Netherlands on June 14, 2023, but he finally made his return to a pitch on Tuesday night when starting for the Under-21s against Huddersfield Town.
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Malacia looked relatively sharp during his first appearance for 517 days and a source close to him said he is fit enough to feature against Ipswich Town for Ruben Amorim's first game.
It's thought the club will be patient with Malacia, though. He won't be thrown into the deep end immediately after his return and has been carefully managed in the last 12 months.
Malacia has now reflected on his recovery process with The Athletic and said: “We spoke to the guy who did my [first knee] surgery and then we made the decision: we had to do something else. I had to start my rehab over, basically… I had one day to be disappointed.
"Then I had to be like, ‘OK, we go again’. I think at the end of the day, everything I did, even if it was a mistake or something, I won’t even see it as a mistake because it’s a lesson.
"I think everything in life is already written for me. I had to go through this whole process to be where I’m at now, so I wouldn’t do anything different.
“You can ask the guys at the club — every time I came in, even though I was feeling s***, sometimes they were like, ‘Oh, your energy is so good, you give me energy again… how is he still smiling, or how is he still working after this and this happened to him?’.”
“Of course, I’ve had some moments where I was like, ‘Oh, I’m getting tired of this’ but there’s no way I could ever give up. It’s not my system, it’s not in our family."
Before the MEN revealed why Malacia had been absent, there was a lack of communication from the club on his situation and conspiracy theories were rife across social media.
“No, nothing was true. No, no, I’ve just been doing my rehab," said Malacia about the conspiracy theories on his extended absence. "Especially when I was in Holland, I was close to my family — so just training, family, sleeping; training, family, sleeping. The only thing I’ve done.
“First of all, I’m not really a guy who’s on social media a lot. If it wasn’t my cousin or my mum sending me this, I wouldn’t even know. Most of the time, a week after I’d find out they were saying this or that.
“As long as my family and I know I’m good, it’s enough. The most important thing is that I know I’m good. People were saying are you not worried or don’t want to say anything, especially friends around me, because other people were asking them because they couldn’t get through to me.
“They were asking me, ‘Don’t you want to say something publicly?’ I was like, ‘No, because I’m not on the internet a lot, I don’t get all this information. If you guys didn’t tell me, I wouldn’t even know."
