Soccer AM

I emailed a photo of the lip to the photographer and he said it was nothing to worry about - just to bring a balaclava for the rest of the face.

Max Rushden
Quotes of the week

It was great last Saturday to get out and play football after our games were cancelled week after week because of the weather.

My side had a cup quarter final, and although I had a pretty poor game, with five minutes left we were 3-1 up and cruising towards the semis (it's the cup we won last year where I scored 2 in the semi and missed the final cos my mate was getting married).

It was at this moment that I cut inside the full back, and decided to swing my left foot from the narrowest of angles. I went for glory. I should have cut it back. But I've got a decent left peg and can generate a fair bit of power. And I did generate a fair bit of power. Unfortunately for me, the ball didn't go anywhere. All the power went from my left foot into the ground, and back into my left foot.

It's a bit like when you swing a five iron on a winter's day and you hit about a yard in front of the ball. But instead of the reverberations going through the club and into your arms, it just went into my ankle. I've done my ankle before. It's weak. I bruise like an old woman to be honest, and I'm having one of those injury ridden seasons.

It meant I missed Tubes' birthday party and instead sat at home in agony with a leg covered in ice. It got to the point where I couldn't walk downstairs - I just had to sit down and lower myself, stair by stair. Eventually I just went to bed because being awake was too painful.

The joy of Twitter is that if you ever do anything stupid, you can tweet that fact and find one of your followers who's gone a step further. Thanks to the person who'd broken their arm that morning by falling off a bucket. It made me feel better. They didn't say what they were doing on the bucket.

Fat lip

Anyway I woke up on the Sunday and hadn't noticed the slightly fat lip i'd got from an elbow to the face (a slightly more manly football injury than kicking the ground). It wasn't particularly noticeable, and on any other Sunday I wouldn't have given it a second's thought.

However I'd been booked in on Monday for a modelling job. Yep. That's a sentence I never thought I'd write. And I have to be humble enough to recognise that had I just been wandering down the street, instead of presenting Soccer AM, I'm not sure that call would have ever come.

But it did, and there I was on Sunday morning, looking at a slightly fat lip, wondering if my only hope of adorning a bus stop poster was in tatters. I didn't need to be nervous. I emailed a photo of the lip to the photographer and he said it was nothing to worry about - just to bring a balaclava for the rest of the face.

Bet

After my photoshoot I went out with Helen and most of the guys to a film premier for friend of the show Jonny Owen's new film. Helen and I didn't watch the film, we'd seen it already and it was overbooked. Instead she just watched me get a little drunk and made me make the promise she made some years ago.

The reason she has a Torquay tattoo on her backside is that she said she'd get it if her side made the play-offs that year. Cambridge had just lost five on the spin, and whether I was trying to impress her I don't know, I agreed that if Cambridge make the play-offs this year, I will get a tattoo. Tattoos aren't my thing. And now I'm nervous. And I can't say for sure what I want to happen.

I didn't commit to what the tattoo would say, nor where it would be, but I did promise. We're currently 14th, 14 points off the play-offs. I'm probably safe.

Either way, next week I'm not going out. I'll end up injured or tattooed. It's too dangerous.

Have a good week...

Max