Belmadi: It's great to be back

8:11am Friday 2nd March 2007

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Djamel Belmadi is now fully fit and ready to fire Saints to promotion after recovering from one of the worst injuries of his career.

The Algerian international had been out since September with a knee injury.

But after a successful operation on his cartilage in France he was back playing for the first team before he had even played for the reserves.

Belmadi had already played 130 minutes of Championship football before playing the first half of the second string's 6-1 win against QPR on Tuesday.

Now the 30-year-old believes he is firing on all cylinders.

He said: "Last year I had a stop-start season because of an Achilles injury and was out for two and a half months and this time I was out for even longer.

"I received a bad kick on the knee last season, it caused cartilage trouble and was very sore so we decided to have surgery and now it's okay."

In-depth interview: See today's Daily Echo.