sport

INCE HINTS AT JANSEN COMEBACK

Jansen - training with Rovers.

Blackburn manager Paul Ince looks set to offer striker Matt Jansen a route back into football, provided he can prove his fitness.

Jansen has been without a club for 18 months since leaving Bolton and had announced his retirement from the game .

However, the 31-year-old has recently started training with his former club Rovers in a bid to get back into the professional game.

"Matt's back playing football and that's great news. He's still fit, he's still got great feet and who knowns what might happen." Ince told the Blackburn website.

"We can't go around spending eight or nine million pounds on a player and if you have the chance to get someone like Matt Jansen fit and see if he can slot into the first team make-up, then it has got to be worth it.

"Matty has been out of the game for a while but he's kept himself fit and he's come here hitting the ground running.

"He's trained with the reserves and had a couple of sessions with the first team this week and he hasn't looked out of place, so each week he'll get better and better."

Jansen was an integral part of the Blackburn side that won the League Cup in 2002 and his form put him on the fringes of the England squad.

He narrowly missed out on place in the World Cup squad as manager Sven Goran Eriksson decided to take defender Martin Keown instead.

During that summer Jansen was involved in a motorcycle accident in Rome that nearly killed him and was in a coma for four days. The striker woke up in his hospital bed to see England's 2-1 quarter final defeat to Brazil on television.

The crash seriously affected the former Crystal Palace man and despite a brief return to the Blackburn first team and a loan spell at Coventry, he never managed to regain the form of 2002.

He was signed by Bolton in January 2006 but was released four months later after failing to make an impact.