'The pain was too much' - Birmingham City favourite opens up on injury hit season

Maxime Colin has been on of Birmingham City’s most reliable players over the last five years. Yet this season even Blues’ Mr Available has been sucked into the whirlwind of injuries that has swept through Lee Bowyer’s squad.

Colin is in his fifth season with Blues and whatever happens he will end with his lowest appearance total since his £2million move from Brentford in 2017. A damaged Achilles in autumn and a thigh strain in spring mean his record of three straight 40-plus-game campaigns has been broken.

However, even though he has missed 13 this term, assuming there are no more mishaps, the Frenchman will make his 200th appearance for the club away to Nottingham Forest a fortnight on Saturday. It will be a fitting landmark for a consistent footballer and ironic that it comes in a disrupted campaign.

“It’s been a bit of an on and off season for me, with the injury at the beginning,” Colin told BirminghamLive. “I am not used to being injured since I have been here. I will take lessons for the future, what was wrong and learn from this and hopefully not get injured any more.

“The Achilles was a big thing because it is not like a hamstring where you have got four weeks off. The Achilles came really slowly and it stayed for a while so we took the decision to take a big break to make sure I was alright because there was no point playing 70 per cent – an Achilles you can’t really say ‘It will be this amount of weeks’.

“We tried to play with the pain early in the season, it worked for a few games but then the pain was too much so we decided to take a big break and now it is alright. You can’t take a chance with an Achilles, there is no point playing 60 or 70 per cent of your capacity , it’s not like if you are 90 per cent