Delivering on and off the pitch... NI hero Jonny and wife celebrate arrival of son
IT has been a week of double celebration for Northern Ireland football star Jonny Evans.
Not only did the Leicester City defender (31) score his first goal of the season, helping to keep the club on Liverpool’s coat-tails at the top of the Premier League, but his headed effort in Sunday’s 4-1 win at Aston Villa came just a few days after watching his wife give birth to their third child in the front seat of his car.
At 5pm last Tuesday, Evans returned from training and his wife Helen’s contractions had started.
At 6.20pm they reached Wythenshawe Hospital. By 6.21pm baby Eli was born — with his wife never leaving the car.
The couple’s first son had been due to arrive at the weekend, but the early appearance freed Evans up to play in Sunday’s match.
“With both our daughters, Helen went into labour on her due date so I was very confident the same would happen again,” the former Manchester United star said.
“But last Tuesday I got a call. I’d just got home from training and Helen was at gymnastics with the girls.
“She said she felt she was going into labour.”
The family still live in south Manchester following Evans’ move to West Bromwich Albion in 2015. He joined Leicester City for £3.5m in June 2018.
Evans added: “We’d planned a different hospital but Wythenshawe was closer. I didn’t really know where I was going.
“We left the house at six, I remember thinking ‘this is coming soon’ because suddenly (from Helen in the passenger seat) it was a different sort of screaming.
“As we pulled up she said, ‘Jonny, my waters have broken’.
“I was trying to get her in a hospital chair and she said ‘I can’t’ and 10 seconds later the baby was born. Fair play, Helen was amazing.”
Evans did not have to deliver Eli because an off-duty midwife, a friend, tailed them in her car and raced out to assist on reaching hospital. They stopped right outside A&E.
He explained: “As I’d got out to get the chair, the midwife’s run over and gone, ‘Let’s get you back in the car’, and Helen’s like, ‘I need to push’.
“The head was completely out. One push.
“She only had to push once,” he said.
“And all the time there was this guy was having a smoke and trying to inform us our car was in the wrong place!”
Belfast-born Evans married Helen McConnell, who he met while she was working as a reporter for Manchester United’s in-house TV station MUTV, at Clough Presbyterian Church on June 1, 2013.
His brother Corry, who plays club football for Blackburn Rovers, plays alongside him in the Northern Ireland side.