Kalvin Phillips reveals gym accident almost scuppered World Cup fitness race

Kalvin Phillips has revealed his successful battle to be fit for the World Cup was almost scuppered after he dropped a weight on his foot in the gym last week.

The Manchester City midfielder underwent shoulder surgery in September before putting himself through gruelling double sessions in a race against time to make England’s squad for Qatar.

While Phillips had played just 14 minutes of competitive football before Gareth Southgate’s squad announcement, he made the cut and jetted out to the Middle East with his 25 team-mates last week.

“My shoulder is fine now. I had the operation about seven and a half weeks ago,” he said.

“It was a 12-week recovery, but with all the work I’ve been doing…I did a lot more than I should have done. But I wanted to recover quicker so I could go to the World Cup and I’m here now.

“It wasn’t a case of ‘if you’re fit then you’ll go’ from Gareth, but when I told him what the situation was, he made it clear he wasn’t going to tell me what to do.

“I think after two days I was straight into football and doing little movements on my shoulder. Then after a week when I was getting a bit of range, I was doing double sessions, I was in a heat chamber to get used to this heat.”

Despite his best efforts to get to Qatar, Phillips conducted his first media engagement with a cut-out in his flip-flops showing puncture wounds in his foot, revealing at the end of the session that he had almost ruined his opportunity of playing in a World Cup for the first time.

“It’s quite a good story to be honest,” he said with a smile.

“I’d gone to pull a weight off the rack and there must have been one stuck behind it and I pulled it off and it has landed straight on my foot and cut it all.

“But it is not too bad – it is the blisters from training (in Qatar) that hurt more. It isn’t too bad, but I stood for about 10 seconds and thought ‘oh my god, what was that?’

“If it wasn’t a 5kg plate, if it had been heavier, I think it would have been a lot worse. Imagine that, that is what you get for being professional!”

He too was selected by Southgate even though, unlike Phillips, he has yet to play for the Premier League champions since returning to training and will miss England’s opener against Iran on Monday.

“I spoke to Kyle before I had my operation,” he added.

“I told him that I knew I wouldn’t be fully match fit because of the game time I missed, but that I would be fully confident in my shoulder and that there would be no chance of it popping back out.

“Kyle pushed me every day. The physios at City made it really tough but extremely rewarding. I am very happy that I had those guys to give me some confidence and a little bit of a push as well.”