In 2002, an inquest confirmed what Jeff Astle’s family had always believed to be true: his job had caused his death. A career of repeatedly heading hard, heavy, leather footballs that retained moisture had caused a degenerative brain condition with no cure.
Astle did not suffer from Alzheimer’s but chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), once thought to be exclusive to former boxers and so colloquially known as “punch drunk” syndrome. Repeated bouts of mild concussion caused by blows to the head had taken their toll.
There is no appetite for a league table here, but dementia is one of life’s cruellest conditions. It simultaneously takes from both the sufferer and those close to them who must witness its relentless assault and increase their care accordingly.
Those with dementia may eventually struggle to recognise their loved ones but the vice versa can also be true; the person you once understood and appreciated is pulled irretrievably from your reach until they become a husk of their previous self. The ultimate prognosis is fatal and the desperate journey towards it plays out in grim real time. Days, weeks, months become a miserable exercise in symptom identification. The final stages are impossibly hard for the care-givers.
In the years that followed Astle’s death, his family became deeply frustrated at the extent to which they believed football was sweeping the issue under the carpet. Daughter Dawn stormed out of a meeting with the PFA in March 2019 and branded chief executive Gordon Taylor an “absolute disgrace” after he evaded questions. In February 2017, Fifa insisted that there was “no true evidence” of a link between football and brain injuries having “followed the issue for more than 15 years”.
Finally, in October 2020, North Wales coroner John Gittins reached the same verdict as in Astle’s case after the death of former Wales midfielder Alan Jarvis, the second verdict in which death was officially determined as “caused by heading balls”. Sandwiching that verdict, Ray Wilson, Martin Peters, Nobby Stiles, Alf Ramsey and Jack Charlton, five members of England’s World Cup-winning group, suffered from dementia. Ramsey had passed away in 1999; the others have passed since.
And the cases keep coming. Last week, Manchester United legend Denis Law revealed his own diagnosis. Perhaps here we are seeing Astle’s greatest legacy: Law had no reticence to call out the cause of his condition. “What else would it be?” Law said. “That was what caused damage to the brain. You were heading the ball, which was quite heavy in those days, but you didn’t think about it. We just thought it was normal. Now as time goes on, you are thinking, ‘Why should I be having this problem?’.”
Two days later, former Liverpool midfielder Terry McDermott discussed his own diagnosis. Rather than dwell upon his own issues, McDermott selflessly spoke of his fear for former team-mates and opponents who are yet to speak out or yet to receive their terrible diagnoses. This is a ticking time bomb.
Change has arrived: overdue change, Dawn Astle would plead. Last month, the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) committee demanded that the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) take a more hands-on role in ensuring that sports injuries are reported, accusing them of a “dereliction of duty” over the delegation over risk management.
Football has altered its rules on concussions and trialled permanent substitutions in the case of head injuries, but received criticism after several players continued after blows to the head. Children aged 11 and under are no longer taught to head footballs in training in the UK and, last month, limitations on headers in training were enforced across the English professional game. Critics suggest that this is an exercise in deckchair rearrangement; what is required is a more wholesale, introspective examination of football’s physical risks.
There was an understandable – if deeply misjudged – reason for football to bury its head in the sand: a reluctance to concede culpability. A generation of physically and mentally damaged former players is an uncomfortable thought. It forces us to raise questions not just about the health of our current and former heroes, but also our own. Did we ever ponder for long enough about what we were doing was safe? Or, as Dawn Astle puts it: “No one in football wants to find out if football is a killer.”
To accept that football’s normal patterns are intrinsically dangerous is to accept that they must change, but a sanitised version of the game is seen by many as deeply undesirable. Our romanticised, Anglicised image of “proper” football – cold winds, strong tackles, battling in the air for a header – is remarkably difficult to shift because we are so ingrained within it, particularly at amateur level. There remains a “man up” culture within British football which insinuates that if you aren’t prepared to take a hit, you aren’t a real competitor.
But that’s nonsense: Nobby Stiles was a competitor, Terry McDermott was a competitor and Jeff Astle was a competitor. They were subjected to physical harm not because they did not want it enough but because the environment in which they worked was harmful towards them and the knowledge about that harm either did not exist (historically) or was quietly ignored (more recently).
There is a risk of injury in any sport, of course. Part of the joy taken in triumph, particularly in individual pursuit, is that it could so easily have been taken away at any time. Yet the desire for sporting contests and entertainment cannot be allowed to dictate where we draw the lines on safety. We owe it to those who have spoken out.
For all the wonderful spectacle and deep joy that football provides, it isn’t worth this. The families of Astle, Stiles, Wilson, Law and McDermott will tell you that. We should have taken this more seriously 20 years ago and we must do so now. The tragedy is that we cannot save those who have already come forward or are yet to. A generation of former players will live in a cloud of fear that they will be next and can do nothing to deflect the oncoming pain. But we can protect those who follow them.
from Football – inews.co.uk https://ift.tt/3sIeXJT
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