AS MICHAEL Owen left Wembley last Sunday he was happily oblivious that the nagging pain at the back of his leg was about to bring his season to a shuddering halt. With his League Cup medal draped round his neck, he still smiled even when it was put to him that he never seemed to have much luck when the England manager, Fabio Capello, was watching. Owen pointed out it had been a virtually injury-free season and reflected "there are a lot worse off than me".

He was referring to Owen Hargreaves, the forgotten man of Old Trafford, last seen on a football pitch in September 2008 shortly before travelling to Colorado to see a specialist who would tell him it looked like a bomb had gone off behind his kneecaps.

Richard Steadman has been repairing sportsmen's knees for 35 years and told Hargreaves he had never seen so much erosion.

"It was a dark day, hard to take," Hargreaves said recently. "This was coming from a guy who was 72-years-old and had seen a lot of knees."

Hargreaves was suffering from chronic patellar tendonitis, so bad that it seems almost inconceivable the medical examinations when he signed from Bayern Munich 13 months earlier allowed the €20m transfer to go ahead. He has spent the past 18 months trying to save his career from becoming an insurance claim and now, finally, there is what Alex Ferguson described yesterday as "light at the end of the tunnel".

United's reserves take on Manchester City's on Thursday and, on the day the club announced Owen would miss the rest of the season because his torn hamstring needed surgery, it emerged that a fit-again Hargreaves will be in the squad for his comeback match. "He has shown for the first time that he is almost ready to play again," said Ferguson.

The venue will be Moss Lane, the home of Altrincham, with Ferguson planning to be among the crowd in the Carole Nash Stand - a far cry from the drama when Milan visit Old Trafford in the Champions League on Wednesday - yet an occasion that might still give Hargreaves more butterflies than any of the European nights that have decorated his career.

He was 27 when he last played. He is 29 now and there have been genuine concerns that he might never be able to play again.

Patellar tendonitis, or "jumper's knee," is an over-use injury, one that typically starts as a dull ache but can gradually increase over a period of time and, in Hargreaves's case, there was stiffness, grinding and swelling.

"As an athlete, you think you are invincible. You don't think something of this magnitude will ever happen. I obviously had the problem when I came to Manchester United from Germany in 2007 and we tried to manage it," Hargreaves said recently.

"But part of the problem for me was my competitiveness . . . But playing on it made it worse."

He had operations on both knees and the first part of his rehabilitation was spent in the United States and Canada. But finally, as one Owen contemplates the end of his season, another is finally looking forward to the start of his.