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Former Premier League star Martin Grainger is a Birmingham City legend to some - and a train driver to others on their daily commute. The 53-year-old enjoyed a 16-year professional career that saw him start at Colchester United before reaching the heights of the top-flight with the Blues.

The ex-defender spent nine years at St Andrews and played a part in their promotion to the Premier League in 2002 and featured in their 2001 Football League Cup Final loss to Liverpool. However, Grainger is best remembered for his thunderous 30-yard free-kick he scored for Birmingham against Manchester United in April 2004 in what was his last ever game in football.

The set-piece scorcher, who now drives trains for Govia Thameslink railway, put Birmingham in the lead but they eventually succumbed to the Red Devils thanks to goals from Cristiano Ronaldo and Louis Saha. Unfortunately for Grainger, his career came to an abrupt end following the match due to a serious knee injury that forced him to retire at just 31 years old.

He previously revealed: "We were playing at Middlesbrough in September 2002. I felt something uncomfortable in my knee. It was causing me pain and scans showed I had suffered a ruptured patellar tendon, which required corrective surgery and a lengthy lay-off.

"Having had the surgery to scrape all the rubbish out, unfortunately I had all sorts of complications with infections so I ended up having three ops to get it cleaned up." He ended up returning three months later and played three more games before being sent out on loan to Coventry.

However, his stint with the Sky Blues lasted just a month and he admitted that after taking a free-kick upon his return to Birmingham, he felt his knee "pop". He explained: "I came on as a sub for Stan Lazaridis after 14 minutes. I remember taking a free-kick and I felt the knee just pop. I tried to keep going until the end of the first half. Then we got another free-kick about 30 yards out. I didn't want to take it, knowing my knee was shot to bits.

"But manager Steve Bruce was shouting across for me to take it so I stepped up and it sailed in to give us the lead. The moment I got back in the dressing room I knew it was bad, the knee was a total mess - there was a hole at the front of the tendon where it had popped. It was extremely hard knowing I wouldn't play again."

It's been quite the career shift for Grainger since his footballing days who now spends his days working on Great Northern routes from King's Cross and Moorgate in London to Stevenage, Letchworth and Welwyn Garden City. Discussing his job as a train driver on the Blues Talk Podcast at the start of the pandemic, he said: "It's strange. There are some days when there's not a lot of people around, and the other day I had 200 or 300 people on the train."