So big, they used to slice the shorts at Fulham FC so that his thighs would not rip them. If anyone had the strength and resolve to overcome a shattering car accident in which his right leg was broken in three places, his knee and ankle splintered and skin torn away, in which it took an hour to cut him from the wreckage and more than a dozen operations and skin grafts to mend him, then it is this colossus of a defender

Chris Coleman is a big man. He had undergone months and months of rehabilitation, had completed the hard yards of summer training But it was just not the same. He was not the same.”There was no chance, really,” Coleman says. “My ankle is as stiff as a board and I could not jump or turn The knee was weak because of the ligament damage I had no chance.

No chance at all.” He had already confided in his best friend and fellow Wales defender Kit Symons, now at Crystal Palace, who had talked him out of “jacking it in” on several occasions, as had his wife, Belinda. “Kit just said, ‘You’ve come all this way’ – but basically I knew it was the end.”Coleman went back to see the surgeons who had operated on him. “They just said to me, ‘To be honest with you, Chris, we cannot even believe you are walking normally, never mind playing football. We expected you to be left with a limp for the rest of your life’.

I thought, ‘Oh well’.”It was not just one doctor, it was two or three, and they just said, ‘You have taken this as far as you can, it is not going to improve any more’ And I thought, ‘OK, that is it’.”And that was it Aged 32. Club captain with 478 League appearances and 32 caps for Wales, a man who believed, prior to the accident, that he was playing the best football of his life. Robbed of two years and now robbed of the rest of his career.Spool back to 2 January 2001 and Coleman was driving home to his wife and four children along a country road in Surrey. Fulham had surprisingly lost the previous day to Stockport County but were destined to run away with the First Division. Coleman – who had cost the club a then-record £2.1 million – was the heart of the team.The weather was filthy, freezing, the air full of sleet. Coleman swerved to miss something in the road – a pheasant, he thinks – and lost control of his Jaguar car, smashing into a tree. Coleman came round to the smell of blood, burning rubber and excruciating pain.