Andros Townsend Escapes Serious Injury After Pitch Roller Accident

By the time Andros Townsend walked off the pitch in Pattani with a 3-0 win in his pocket and only a few bruises to show for it, he knew he had got away with one.

Hours earlier, the 35-year-old PT Prachuap forward had been run over by a pitch roller.

Not clipped. Not nudged. Run over.

It happened in the chaos of the pre-match warm-up. A member of staff appeared to lose control of a heavy roller, which veered into Townsend and caught the lower left side of his body. Only a split-second decision to throw himself to the ground stopped the incident from becoming a career-ending – or worse – catastrophe.

“Every time I watch it, it sends shivers down my spine. I can hardly believe it. It's terrible to watch it again and realise what could have happened,” Townsend recalled on the programme Football Uncensored.

He had seen the roller once already and thought little of it.

“I remember thinking: I've never seen that in my career before, what are they doing? But we were called out for the warm-up. I didn't think anything more of it,” he said. “The next time I saw it, I was literally underneath it.”

The pressure finally told on his instincts. As the machine rolled towards him, Townsend hurled himself down at just the right moment, minimising the damage.

“Luckily, I was fortunate enough to manage to throw myself to the ground at exactly the right moment, so that nothing was broken when the roller went over me.”

He felt the weight instantly.

“It (the roller) was pretty heavy, but I somehow managed to lift it and push it away from me. When it was then completely on top of me, I was getting a little crushed. I was able to lift my left arm and relieve some pressure that way. Then I managed to gather my team-mates around me, who were able to lift the roller, and I could wriggle out. But at the moment it crushed my left leg, I have to say, it was pretty frightening.”

For any player, it would have been terrifying. For Townsend, with his injury history, it was chilling.

The 13-cap England international has carried the scars of a long Premier League career with Tottenham Hotspur, Crystal Palace and Luton Town. His left knee and left ankle, both previously operated on, flashed through his mind as the roller pinned him down.

“I thought either my left ankle was going to break or my left knee. I thought I was done for. I was very lucky that I was able to limp away from it and recover within a few minutes,” he admitted.

He got away with bumps and bruises. Nothing more. No fracture, no ligament tear, no stretcher.

“Fortunately, there were no serious injuries. A few bumps and bruises, but I got away unscathed,” Townsend said.

Even then, the drama wasn’t over. Team-mates urged him to stop, to get checked, to step away from the session. Townsend refused. He finished the warm-up, then played, featuring late on as PT Prachuap cruised to a 3-0 victory.

“My team-mates were very surprised that I carried on with the warm-up. They told me to go to the doctor,” he said. He didn’t. Within minutes he felt able to continue, and the scare stayed exactly that – a scare.

The incident is not expected to affect his move to Southeast Asia or his plans for the twilight of his career. As he put it, it will “definitely not stop him from carrying on”.

Off the pitch, Townsend did what modern footballers do: he turned to Instagram. Earlier in the season he had joked about Thai away pitches, comparing them to the famously unforgiving conditions at Stoke City’s Bet365 Stadium. After the roller episode, he went back to that theme with a wry caption.

“Away at Stoke wasn't that bad after all,” he wrote.

For a player who has battled serious injuries for years, a rogue pitch roller in Pattani could have been the final, absurd twist. Instead, Townsend walked away, played his part in a comfortable win and carried on with his new life in Thai League 1.

He has known bad luck. This time, he met it head-on, went under it, and somehow came out the other side.