Painful truth is that we’re not always faking it...

Happy birthday to me,” I thought as the doctor stuck a needle the size of a javelin into my groin, far too close to the crown jewels for comfort. It wasn’t the best way to be celebrating my 26th year on this planet, but when you’re injured, you’ve got to do what you’ve got to do, birthday or no birthday. There’s no doubt that us players are seen as a more delicate bunch than we used to be. Back in the day, not only did they kick medicine balls around lumpy pitches while wearing big old boots, but most of the time they’d do it all with an arm hanging off.

Manchester City goalkeeper Bert Trautmann broke his neck in the 1956 FA Cup Final but played on. Mind you he was German so that’s what I’d expect. Unlike Ray Wood, the Manchester United goalkeeper who broke his cheekbone in the following year’s final and played on, but had to go out on the wing instead. Wimp.

These days everyone seems to think that a broken nail is enough to keep us out for a month, which is actually quite unfair because the game has evolved a lot. It’s now much quicker and much more athletic and ironically, the fitter you are the finer the balance in your body becomes, which is why it’s so easy to tweak something. Fair enough there will always be those players who’ll run through brick walls and will never complain. But some people simply aren’t as physiologically robust as others. It’s just a basic human difference that applies in any walk of life.

Of course our reputation has been made worse by all the faking that goes on. We’ve all seen those incidents when a player goes down and starts convulsing as if someone is prodding him with an electrode and next thing you know he sprints off and scores just like it never happened. I remember Carlos Valderrama going down in a game between Germany and Colombia at the 1990 World Cup in Italy. It looked really bad and he was carried off on a stretcher. Apparently he was halfway to the team hotel when he decided he wasn’t that injured after all, turned round, came back to the stadium and was back on again within 15 minutes.

Rivaldo made the headlines at the World Cup in 2002 after he hit the deck clutching his face after a ball had gently grazed past his . . . thigh. But my personal favourite came in a Kaiserslautern game when Otto Rehhagel was in charge. He made a substitution and managed to exceed their foreign player quota by doing so, which meant they had to get someone off sharpish. So one of the players was told to fake an injury, but the guy who went down couldn’t keep a straight face and the cameras caught him giggling away on the floor. In fact he was laughing so much he had to put a tracksuit top over his head as he sat on the bench.

When you see a genuinely bad injury, it’s really nasty though. I remember seeing Antti (Social) Niemi go for a ball and come down vertically on his head. I thought he’d broken his neck. Stuff like that is horrible at the best of times, let alone when it’s one of your team mates.

But I suppose we’re the lucky ones. If we get badly injured we get flown off for the best treatment. If a Sunday League player had dislocated his knee as Jimmy Bullard did a couple of years back, he’d probably never walk straight again, whereas Bully was back playing football in a year or so. Although you’d have thought the surgeons would have sorted that barnet out while they were at it.

My own life has flashed before me once or twice. Down one side of Fratton Park, the seats are actually lower than the pitch and I was bombing down that particular wing when one of their defenders clattered me. I was running so fast I ended up diving head first into a load of Portsmouth fans. I was grateful for the cushion but I’m not sure if a load of hard plastic seats would have been safer.

The other nasty one was a head-on collision with West Brom’s Paul “The Truck” Robinson. I bounced off him, literally, and landed 15 feet away, breaking my first rib. To give you an idea of the impact, it’s very rare to break that particular rib – it only tends to happen in car crashes.