Jarreau Hayward has not given up resuming his playing career next season after a serious injury last month ended his season with St George’s.

The player-coach, who turned 35 on the weekend, suffered three fractures in the fibula and tibia on his right leg from the seventh-minute tackle with Allan Douglas Jr in an FA Cup first-round match with Devonshire Cougars on January 20.

An ambulance took Hayward to hospital with the match held up for some 25 minutes. Hayward had emergency surgery that day and it wasn’t until the next morning that he learnt from messages on his phone that St George’s had beaten the Premier Division side on penalty kicks in the only upset of the round.

Hayward, who also coaches the St George’s under-15s, will take time during the coming months to determine if he can return to playing.

“I’m not making any decisions yet, I have one to three weeks left in the healing process and then after that rehab, so I’m going to take the rest of the year to take care of my body and focus on coaching,” he explained.

“Come end of the year or beginning of next year I’ll see if the team need me and will make a decision from there. Right now, I’m just focusing on healing.

“Most athletes do know their body and so I knew [how serious it was] immediately and went straight to the ground. I just knew it was broken and told whoever was nearest to me to call an ambulance.

“After that, it was focusing on keeping it still because I knew something was wrong. I didn’t want to move it and make it worse. “Dougie” is one of my good friends and is just a competitor, one of the reasons why he is a good footballer and a good Cup Match cricketer as well.

“It was a 50-50 thing, I was trying to play the ball forward and he was trying to clear the ball. It was just one of those things, I wasn’t ready for it and he was determined to get the ball. I have two breaks in my fibula and one in my tibia and had surgery later that day.

“The doctor admitted me into surgery after he saw the X-rays and how much pain I was in.

“He called an on-call anaesthesiologist to get it going and they released me the next day. I’ve been recovering ever since.”

Hayward added: “They said anywhere from six to eight weeks for the bone to heal, then I have to build the muscle back up.

“That’s what I’m looking forward to, the rehab, getting my body back in better shape than it has ever been, or at least when I was in my prime.

“I’m so busy coaching two teams and teaching at Berkeley that I don’t have an opportunity to go to the gym, but now without playing I can make time for the gym.”

The coaching duties at St George’s have been taken over by goalkeeper Freddie Hall, Kerwin Moreno and Mishael Paynter, though Hayward was on the bench for the recent FA Cup quarter-final match against X-Roads who came out 5-0 winners.

“The doctor said to give it time and not worry about this season, but next season, with hard work hopefully, I will be able to resume my playing career,” said the Social Studies teacher who briefly had a stint in the national team set-up under coach Andrew Bascome in 2015.

“I’m definitely thankful it is a bone and not a ligament or joint like my knee or ankle because then my career would definitely be over. I am definitely going to continue to coach, if the club will have me, but I’m not thinking about playing right now, just focusing on getting my body healthy.

“Once I’m healthy, I’ll see where the team is because we have some young centre backs coming through and it will be a good opportunity for them to stake their claim for a starting position. I’m just thankful the injury wasn’t worse and thankful for those coaches who have stepped in.

“Against X-Roads, unfortunately we had a lot of guys missing, so it was difficult to set up a game plan. David Signor had to leave to go to a previous engagement and that’s why we had to sub him. We didn’t even have a defensive replacement for him and had to put on a striker.

“X-Roads played well. but we had the odds stacked against us. With a full complement of players, we would have given X-Roads a good game, but they deserved to move on.”

n The annual Cal Rayner memorial match will be played at Wellington Oval on Saturday at 3pm, involving St George’s All-Stars players. The former St George’s Colts player died while playing in an All-Stars interclub game in 2015 at Wellington Oval.

Rayner was one of the top players of his era and played for Bermuda in the 1968 Bermuda International Youth Tournament held here featuring the United States, Canada, Mexico, Haiti and Barbados. Some of Rayner’s team-mates in that tournament were captain Alan Richardson, Clyde Best, Harold Madeiros, Clarence Symonds, Dereck and Dale Russell, John “Johnny” Nusum, Roger Hunt, Erskine “Choe” Smith, David Frost, Mel Lewis and Richard “Dirt” Simmons.