Stuart Holden admits he's had to fight more than most to earn success with Bolton Wanderers.
Between a serious knee operation at 17, suffering a fractured eye socket in a street attack, breaking his ankle on trial at Leicester and then doing the same to his leg in March, Holden has endured enough setbacks to break a lesser man.
The assault, in Newcastle city centre in March 2005, was particularly devastating for Holden as his two-month lay off effectively ended his chances of making it at Sunderland.
But Bolton's USA international is made of stuff as hard as his birthplace, the granite city of Aberdeen, and Holden has bounced back from these setbacks to star in Wanderers' rise up the table.
"If I look back, for every bad thing that's happened or knock I've taken, I've come back stronger," he told the Sunday Mirror. "The night of the attack, I was waiting with my brother for a taxi and I got blindside punched. I was left with double vision for two months.
"I had to have surgery on my eye. It was a blow-out fracture, which is one in a thousand - the muscle in your eye gets caught when it fractures, so your eye can't look up or down. These guys were from Newcastle and we were from Sunderland, but I can't say if it had anything to do with football rivalry.
"People asked me if I'd go back to England after it happened, but it didn't deter me from wanting to come back or scare me. I just put it down to bad luck.
"It was the same with the broken leg with Nigel de Jong. I'd just broken into the team here and it really bummed me out. But I've put that behind me and I'm just focused on the future."
