“I was on the train, just chilling. Suddenly, someone’s come over my shoulder, and stabbed me.”
Footballer Jonathan Gjoshe pauses as he recalls the harrowing events of 1 November last year.
Just weeks into his first season at Scunthorpe United, the 23 year-old had been travelling from Doncaster back to his home in London. But about an hour into the journey, the unimaginable happened.
Gjoshe was among the 11 passengers seriously injured in a knife attack on a train as it travelled through Cambridgeshire.
While it soon emerged that Gjoshe had been hurt in an incident that made headlines around the world, the defender chose to ignore the many media requests received by the club, and focus instead on his long road to recovery.
But six months on, he is finally ready to speak publicly about his ordeal for the first time. And why he is now looking for a new club.
“I got stabbed on the shoulder first”, he tells BBC Sport in an exclusive interview.
“I remember jumping over the table, jumping over the chairs. I was just running down the corridor, telling people, ‘there’s a guy with a knife, run, I’ve been stabbed, run, run, run’. I was screaming. I think I was the first person that got stabbed. I felt the pain. But adrenaline kicked in.”
Gjoshe remembers how, despite his warning to other passengers, “some thought it was a joke at first, because obviously it was Halloween the day before. Some people ran, some just sat there, but I thought he was coming for me.
“That split second, me jumping over the table, saved me. All I thought about was just running for my life, getting off that train. As I got down to the first or second carriage, I pulled the alarm, and was just drenched with blood.”
“I was thinking I wasn’t going to see my family again, if I died, and that was the main worry for me”, he says. “Normally I would drive back down to London. That was the first time I got on a train to go back. What’s the chance of that happening? It’s crazy.”
The train made an emergency stop at Huntingdon where it was met by armed police. Having been given first aid by a fellow passenger, Gjoshe managed to get himself out to the station car park, from where paramedics rushed him to hospital.
It was only after surgery that he learned he had sustained seven wounds to his bicep, shoulder and arm.
