A legacy of broken men and broken minds
n odd concept, the header. Surely, there could be no more counterintuitive element of a game supposed to be played with feet. We take it for granted these days, acclaiming it as an art form in itself. Where would we be, for example, without Pele’s dazzling bullet beyond Enrico Albertosi in the 1970 World Cup final, or all the moments that Alan Shearer would launch himself like a missile to nod past a flailing goalkeeper?
Headers have been around so long that they are codified in football as a norm, a means of averting contact with the hands and thus establishing a crucial point of difference with, say, rugby.
And yet they arrived in the sport essentially by accident. It was George Sampson, as documented in Tim Harris’s book who furnished us with the earliest known example, on Jan 27, 1872. A short man, with a penchant on the pitch for belligerent retribution, he stirred not a few sniggers when, in a lively contest between the Sheffield Football Association and its London equivalent, he took to controlling the ball with his head.
This newspaper was struck by the novelty value. According to
correspondent that day, Sampson produced an “ingenious method of ‘heading’ the ball – i.e. stopping it with the head so placed as to make it rebound in the direction it came from”. In that instant, a whole skill was born.
A little over 145 years on, we are questioning whether heading truly is a sensible idea.
has been leading a campaign highlighting the prevalence of dementia amongst former footballers and the sport’s abject neglect in investigating the links between playing football and brain damage – a failing which could yet prompt a raft of legal actions.
The issue was also brought into relief by a British study this week, which said that in six post-mortems on players with dementia, four men displayed signs of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a condition associated with repetitive head trauma. Four of six: it is an alarming proportion, when the general incidence of CTE among Britons is 12 per cent.
The evidence suggesting a connection between headers and brain injury is thrown into starkest relief when one considers England’s beloved World Cup class of 1966. Martin Peters, who scored the first goal in the final, is suffering from such an advanced stage of dementia that he struggles to recall daughter Leann’s name. Nobby Stiles’s toils with the same illness are so acute that house visits are off limits to all but his closest family. Jack Charlton admits that he is losing his memory. As for Ray Wilson, he is unable to remember the part he played in English football’s finest hour, whiling away his days drawing pictures and picking daffodils for his wife, Pat.
It is a desperate legacy. What is doubly shocking, though, is that these are far from isolated cases.