THE date was Saturday, February 23 2013.

It is a date no Concord Rangers or Thurrock player will forget in a hurry, as that was the day that fans favourite and hotshot striker Harry Elmes saw his season come crumbling down, as he broke his right tibia and fibula.

A crunching tackle from Fleet’s Ben Walster ended Elmes’ Ryman Premier League campaign and left his non-league career in jeopardy. At the time Beachboys boss Danny Cowley described the red-card challenge as “cowardly”.

But 19 months later the 28-year-old has pulled on a Concord Rangers shirt for the first time since that dark day. He earned a rousing reception from home fans and home players as he came on for a 30-minute appearance in a friendly against Billericay Town last Wednesday.

Elmes didn’t score in the 7-0 win, but said stepping onto the pitch for the first time since he was driven to hospital in “terrible pain”, was a “relief but very weird”.

“Going on felt very strange,” said Elmes. “It has been such a long time but I don’t think I did too badly. It was really nice for the rest of the boys to clap me on as they have been helping me through this since the very beginning.

“The boys have been brilliant. The core of the team that have been at the club since I joined in 2010 have been with me all the way. And of course people like Danny and Nicky (Cowley) who have been so supportive and understanding.

“I did a lot of my comeback work with Nicky in the gym and it is great to have someone like him alongside you.

“The biggest thing for me now is fitness and building up the muscle that I lost. That will take time but I want to come back from this and prove I can play at Conference South level.”

Elmes says he wants to move past the horror injury and concentrate on his football, but said his return felt an awful long way away on that cold February afternoon.

“I don’t remember a lot,” said the striker. “It was a bad tackle and I knew instantly my leg was broken. I felt a lot of pain and, as luck would have it, it was a freezing cold day.

“It felt like I was on the pitch forever before the ambulance came to take me to the hospital. I think I went with my cousin James (Elmes) and Jason (Hallett) and Danny (Cowley) came to see me straight away as well.

“Thankfully I was hooked up to the morphine and that took away a lot of the pain but I knew what a long, hard slog it would be to get back on the pitch again.”

Elmes stayed in Southend Hospital after the operation and says he couldn’t drive again until June, and he says he found it hard to rely on other people.

“I owe quite a few people lifts,” he laughs. “I wanted to get back playing again as soon as possible but, in all honesty, it has probably taken me a bit longer to return that I would have expected.

“I was back light-training at Concord in December, just doing the warm-ups and other basic training and I found it hard. Obviously the team is much fitter now due to the requirements of playing in the Conference South and that is something I will need to get used to.

“But over the Christmas period I took a few weeks off in my recovery and that really set me back. I moved house and maybe took my foot off the gas a bit.

“Then in April I felt some pain in my right leg when I was running and I had to have the plates removed. I am no stranger to surgery as I had a couple of hernia operations when I was at Waltham Abbey but it was frustrating.”

Elmes said the muscle atrophy has been a hard barrier to overcome, although he says he has been told by a doctor that once he builds up the muscle in his leg it will be at least two times as strong as it was prior to the break.

“I need to be fitter and stronger,” said Elmes. “I haven’t played at this level and training for the last five or six weeks has been hard.

“But I felt ready to come back against Billericay. I spoke to Danny and said I could manage about 30 minutes and it went OK.

“What I need now is match practice. I will talk to Danny about maybe getting some game time somewhere else and then I hope I will be able to play for Concord when I am ready.”

Elmes says he hasn’t heard from Walster since the tackle, which he admits “was disappointing”, but says this is a chapter of his life he wants to put behind him.

“I want to crack on,” said Elmes.

And we all hope he does, without cracking any more bones of course.