It was a really good event last night at Ferryhill Working Men's Club - packed out actually, barely a free chair in the room. I shared a table with a former Boro junior and local league player who like me is getting slower and slower in parkruns and the daughter of former Nottingham Forest and Brian Clough trainer Jimmy Gordon who himself died from dementia.
Dave Parnaby, Tony McAndrew, Eddie Kyle and Gary Pallister were all in the audience as were some of the staff of Spennymoor Town who recently carried out an experimental match limiting heading.
Both the launch and the book itself will be instrumental in education and messaging. Myth busting also, CTE and dementia is not a disease from the old leather ball. The speed of the modern game makes a modern football every bit as lethal.
Heading drills in training are a thing of the very distant past, not according to Gordon McQueen or Alan Shearer. And this is a timebomb afterall. Like asbestosis that eventually claimed my uncle, CTE afflicts the ex player 20 or 30 years afterwards.
Do other contact sports have similar outcomes? CTE is the scientific name for what was referred to as being punch drunk with boxers from the 1920s. In rugby Judith Gates says she has been helping former players getting early onset dementia in their 40s.
There were some great questions from the audience. One grandad recounting how his 4 year old grandson had just embarked on his football journey in Trimdon and how it was such a great footballing community and the grandson could grow up in this nurturing environment. He didn't want to stop him, yet he was concerned what could he do?
Judith said they now look at the charity as potentially saving one player and one family at a time. Don't take your kids and grandsons into the garden playing head tennis.
Mike Amos revealed there is real momentum now for reducing and eradicating heading in training for young footballers.
Judith Gates said that in 40 years time people would look back and be shocked we allowed footballers to be exposed to these risks. The FA were asked many times but would not comment on No-Brainer book. It is clear they are burying their heads in the sand, terrified regarding litigation. And surely it is only a matter of time before that really hits them like a tidal wave.
How much better Judith says for the FA and the other silent partner PFA to embrace this now as an industrial injury and work to make football the safest contact sport in the world.
We were meeting at Bill's birthplace Ferryhill on the 50th anniversary of the Match of Champions, Middlesbrough 4-4 Leeds United, Bill Gates Testimonial. People have often said how lucky Bill was to have had that near sell out crowd to send him out in to the world with a major financial send off. Not so sure about that when Evening Gazette reporter, Craig Johns pointed out how many of the players taking part have succumbed to dementia,. The two managers also died from neurological disease.
At the match, Bill had headed his final ball for Boro, a day shy of his 30th birthday. He had complained of crippling migraines and decided he really needed to stop playing. Five decades on and he had died, unable to speak and unable to remember that game or any other game. His death had come after an often traumatic battle, CTE is an unstoppable but deeply disturbing decline. At time Bill had pleaded with family to get him tablets or a gun to release him from his torment. Let's not let his premature death be in vain.
