Astles get ‘one step closer’ to the truth

Family determined to push for further brain research

IT is fair to say that Laraine Astle has never sought the limelight. Three years ago Sportsmail reporter Sam Peters interviewed her about a study the English Football Association had promised into her husband Jeff’s death, and she asked her daughter Dawn to be present for moral support. The interview lasted several hours and was more significant than either of them had thought possible.

Both women were under the illusion that the FA had, as promised, been working on a 10-year joint study with the Professional Footballers’ Association into possible links between heading footballs and neuro-degenerative illnesses among former players.

A 2002 inquest found that there had been ‘trauma’ throughout the brain of Jeff Astle, the prolific West Bromwich Albion striker, and that ‘occupational’ causes had contributed to his death at the age of 59.

Peters told them that no FA research had been published and that Sportsmail had been unable to locate a shred of evidence of the study ever being made.

‘We were staggered,’ said Dawn. ‘The FA had decided to discontinue the study and hadn’t told us.

‘If it hadn’t been for Sam seeing Mum that day, we would still been thinking they were getting on with it. None of what has happened would have happened.’

The Astles discovered, through the efforts of Peters and Sportsmail, that a number of NFL footballers had been found to have a brain condition — chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) — because of head injuries. ‘I wondered if my dad had that and not Alzheimer’s,’ added Dawn. ‘I didn’t know whether we could find out. I assumed it was too late to know.’

No one had informed the family before that interview that Jeff’s brain was still at Queen’s Medical Centre in Nottingham if they wanted it to be tested for CTE.

A leading neuropathologist, Dr Willie Stewart, helped Dawn have it delivered to him at Glasgow University, where he established that her father had indeed been suffering from CTE and not Alzheimer’s, as detailed on his death certificate.

And so it came to be that this unassuming family from a former Derbyshire pit village became campaigners for research into possible links between brain disease and football. Their efforts finally reached fruition last week, when the FA announced they were commissioning Dr Stewart to undertake the research project which they had quietly discarded years ago.

There were more frustrations for the Astle family even as the research was announced. The FA decided to release the news on Thursday — precisely the day that they had invited Dawn to Wembley Stadium for the UK Sports Concussion Research Symposium they were cohosting with the English RFU.

Committed to hear podium speakers, including Dr Stewart, she found herself with limited time to return media calls and worked through many of them in her car, outside Wembley, finally leaving for home in the late afternoon. The delay meant at least one major TV opportunity to push the campaign was missed.

It was typical of how these past three years have been. The Astle family’s campaign has relied on the game’s ordinary people to give it oxygen while the governing body and the players’ union have appeared confused at best, uninterested at worst.

Albion, where they called their No 9 ‘The King’, helped ensure that 17,000 leaflets were distributed, as well as 27,000 cards, which were raised on the ninth minute of a match.

The Astles have never forgotten how Hull City stewards made it their business to make the first ‘Justice for Jeff’ banner highly visible, when Albion played the Tigers in December 2014.

The family’s disappointment that night when Match Of The Day did not feature the banner ultimately saw national attention build.

In April 2015, Sportsmail revealed that FA chairman Greg Dyke apologised to the Astles for the FA’s inaction and said the governing body would not make the same mistake again. That was nearly three years ago. The PFA have frustrated the Astles most because the family consider it the union’s job to support former players. Dawn says chief executive Gordon Taylor declared on national radio that he organised a neurosurgeon to advise the family, when her mother met no such person and has never met Taylor.

The selection of Dr Stewart to carry out the research is seen as encouraging, given his credibility in neuropathology and lack of a position within sport, which means he has no one from football’s establishment

lobbying him. But the Astles are slightly concerned that the research’s sole focus is on discovering if neuro-degenerative disease is more common in ex-professional footballers than in the general public — not if there is a direct link between heading a ball and brain injury or if the young are particularly susceptible.

‘We need to know what’s happening in the brain, too,’ Dawn told Sportsmail.

‘We do need the epidemiological work.’ She has become steeped in the knowledge of this field in the two years and eight months since that meeting with Peters.

Dr Magdalena Ietswaart, co-author of a 2016 University of Stirling study which revealed heading does have short-term effects, has also argued for an assessment of the effects of heading or head injuries in football.

That kind of research is more expensive than the £14,533 the FA are paying out for the Stewart study. The Drake Foundation, a not-forprofit organisation dedicated to helping people understand concussion injuries in sport, have told Dawn that they are hugely impressed with her work and keen to discuss at length if it can help.

‘It should never, ever have taken so long to get to where we are,’ she said.

‘When we found that the NHS assessment of dad was wrong, we immediately felt there must be other players who were wrongly diagnosed.

‘The tragedy for families caring for players with dementia is that you can’t diagnose CTE until that individual has died. We’ve taken one step closer to a better understanding this week but it’s hard to feel delighted.

‘Dad was loved so much at Albion but he was so young when he began this terrible decline.

‘We would rather he had been an ordinary man doing an ordinary job if it meant him being spared what he went through and if meant we could have enjoyed his company and his laughter a little longer. We lost him too soon.’

‘THE PFA HAVE FRUSTRATED THE ASTLES... THEIR JOB IS TO SUPPORT’