Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
PFA SHAME OVER FOOTBALL’S HISTORIC DEMENTIA SCANDAL
DAWN ASTLE isn’t the first woman to fight like a lion for a deceased family member ignored by a scandal involving football.
Nor is she the first to remark – when her defiant stance was finally vindicated by hard evidence – that “the truth always comes out”.
That’s why the daughter of West Brom legend Jeff Astle – who was told by a coroner in 2002 that her father had died of an “industrial illness” and demanded to know what was being done about it – is owed a debt of gratitude by football.
Because, through all those years when her quest for answers drew support from hundreds of ex-players and their families, no one in authority wanted to know.
Either through lack of interest, laziness or a fear that their coffers would be hit, the ruling body, the FA, and her father’s union, the PFA, patronised her with platitudes in the hope she would go away. Eventually, 22 months ago, the FA and PFA commissioned a report from Glasgow University brain specialist Dr Willie Stewart.
He studied the deaths of 7,676 ex-professionals, compared them to 23,000 non-footballers, and found dementia medications were prescribed five times as frequently to ex-players and they were five times as likely to be killed by Alzheimer’s.
So, more than 17 years after a coroner ruled that repeatedly heading heavy leather balls contributed significantly to Astle’s death, the authorities were forced to take the ruling seriously.
It prompted Jeff’s widow Laraine, who has never had a phone call from PFA chairman of 38 years, Gordon Taylor, to say: “He should go now.”
A livid Chris Sutton went further, accusing Taylor of having “blood on his hands”.
Sutton, whose ex-pro father Mike suffers with a degenerative brain disease caused by repetitive trauma, said: “This study was rolled out 15 years too late.
“Gordon Taylor had a duty of care to his members.
“If he had anything about him, he would have said sorry to all the footballers he failed, past and present. Then the honourable thing would have been for him to walk.”
But Taylor, 74, didn’t apologise. He didn’t even attend the unveiling of the report or, as the FA did, ring the Astle family when the findings became clear. Instead, in what seemed like a dictated statement handed to him by lawyers, he is quoted as saying it’s “incumbent on football globally to address this issue in a comprehensive and united manner”.
When what the hundreds of families of ex-players currently battling dementia needed from the trade union leader was a sincere mea culpa.
They wanted steps to make an obscenely wealthy sport pay back those who helped build its global profile and a pledge to increase the £565,000 it gives each year to affected members. A sum that is less than a quarter of Taylor’s annual £2.29million pay package.
The lack of a decent reaction wouldn’t have surprised Dawn Astle. When she met Taylor for a TV documentary two years ago, he said he wasn’t sure of any link between dementia and heading old leather balls.
When she told him the PFA had a duty of care, he pleaded poverty – causing her to pull off her mic and storm out in tears.
It baffles virtually everyone in football that, after almost four decades in charge of the PFA, despite a litany of cock-ups and a vague vow to go sometime in the future, Taylor still remains in control like a septuagenarian Third World dictator.
The only silver lining in this sad saga is that Taylor’s indifference to calls from people like Chris Sutton and the Astles to do the decent thing and resign sums up his legacy to perfection.