When Jordan Willis ruptured his patella tendon in February 2021, he expected to be out for six months. However, a second rupture sustained during surgery to fix the original issue has ended up keeping the defender out for over a year.
The former Coventry man returned to training last week but he has detailed how the injury affected him on a mental level in an interview with BBC Radio Newcastle. He revealed that at times he worried for the future of his career, saying: "It’s a weird one because initially you’re worried about the injury, worried about how long you’re going to be out.
"You get the scans and you take it on board but it doesn’t fully sink in yet. When you’re sat in the physio room the isolation sets in.
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"Different injuries have different timings. It was meant to be a six-month injury. After the second rupture it was difficult to get my head around but at the same time, I did manage to get my head around it pretty early. Just the fact they are career-threatening injuries so it wasn’t about worrying about the time-frame but just getting back playing [at all]."
In explaining how being away from the rest of the team and playing and 'finding his identity' in playing football had affected him, Willis explained that he and team-mate Luke O'Nien had found ways to cope. O'Nien has returned to the team already by this stage, however he missed 19 games with a shoulder injury and was a companion of Willis' in the treatment room.
"For the first however many months of my injury that want to be back out there wasn’t there. I just had to focus on getting myself right before I could even think about being back out there," he added.
"I thought I was doing fine [mentally] in the first part of my injury but looking back I wasn’t. I didn’t feel I was in a rut or affected by it but looking back now I was in a place where I wasn’t really going anywhere but recently I’ve been doing a mental health course with Luke [O’Nien] which has opened my eyes to see have values in your life that you search for and if you don’t see those and you’re not moving forwards or backwards you’re just there and that’s where I was."
Willis also explained how previous Sunderland manager Lee Johnson kept him involved in the work of the team, by having him carry out analysis work. The defender explained how that helped him with purpose but also to understand new things about football.
"He came to me regularly during my injury and asked me about roles to keep me involved and I said I’d be happy to take anything on. He had me doing a bit of opposition scouting through video, holding meetings before games and then analysing our performance after the game.
"It opened my eyes to football analysis. You think as a player you kind of know everything but writing things down about it and analysing it, for me as a defender, I know what the strikers and defenders are supposed to do. For the central midfielders I know where I want them to be but watching and noticing it was different to how I thought it was going to be."
Before his injury, Willis had been a regular in the Sunderland team. He started all but one of the League One fixtures in 19/20. Injuries became an issue in his second season at the club and he had already missed 11 games with other issues before rupturing his patella in February of the 20/21 season.
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