Doctors said I could have been suffering concussion for 13 years, reveals Kevin Doyle
FORMER Ireland striker Kevin Doyle, forced to retire early because of concussion, has been told by doctors that he was probably suffering concussion without realising it throughout his 13-year senior career, before heading the ball started making him feel continually ‘dazed’ and nauseous.
Doyle has said that specialists in the United States, where I had been playing for MLS side Colorado Rapids, told him that if he had taken a twoweek rest after bangs to the head earlier in his career, he may not now be experiencing the persistent problems which have led him to quit.
‘I was never officially concussed my whole career until this year. It wasn’t a thing five or ten years ago,’ he said recently.
It is ‘a good thing that there’s becoming more awareness,’ Doyle declared, in a week when the Alan Shearer BBC documentary on the football and dementia link delivered huge profile to a subject which Sportsmail has been campaigning on for two years.
The 34-year-old said he thought it was odd when he felt repeatedly unwell every time he headed a ball 18 months ago, but he carried on in the hope of shaking the problem off.
‘I felt a bit odd and had a dazed feeling,’ he said. ‘To begin with, I didn’t really correlate it with heading.
‘I‘d come in after training and I wouldn’t feel well. After a while I started to realise that every time I head the ball, I’m not feeling great. When you’re a player, if your muscles are feeling good, your legs are feeling good, you don’t care about anything else. I thought: “I can get through the week without heading the ball”.’
Doyle began dropping out of finishing drills in training and avoiding heading the ball outside of matches, hoping that after a three-month postseason break the problem would have gone away. But he returned to training in January, and immediately became concussed again after a collision with his own goalkeeper in a preseason game.
He saw a neurologist but did not disclose the full nature of his previous problems for
fear that he would be prevented from playing.
It was after a second concussion — when a clearance by team-mate Ashley Cole hit him on the head — that he explained his symptoms in full to medics, having discussed doing so with his wife, Jenny.
Of the goalkeeper collision, he said: ‘I shouldn’t have got a concussion from it, it was a simple collision. I had a bad concussion and I never had a bad concussion from a simple collision before. That worried me.
‘To be fair, in America, they’re very good. Straight away, [you’re] not allowed train, not allowed to play. You go see a neurologist. I didn’t tell him a word about my heading the ball issues because you know deep down that if you tell them those things, they’re not going to let you play. I get through the year, I can manage that.’
The Cole incident concerned him enough to have a full discussion with neurologists, who told him he could encounter repeated concussion if he continued playing.
‘You get stuck with headaches, you get stuck with feeling sick, you get stuck feeling a bit depressed, basically. You’re like in a ‘funk’, they call it. You’re not right. That was the prognosis, he said, that could happen. I sought a second opinion but the doctors agreed.’