Without football, without the club, I don’t know how I would have found the strength to stand up again...

Cardiff saved doc after daughter’s death

LEN NOKES is in the car when I ring. I tell him I’d like to talk about Claire. ‘I’m going to see her now, actually,’ he says. It is early evening, his favourite time of the day to visit. The sun shines directly on to the plot where her ashes are buried and catches the bloom of the flowers. The cemetery is quiet, usually. ‘I just talk to her,’ he says.

On Sundays, he says, he takes a small bottle of Prosecco, Claire’s favourite drink, with him to share with her. He sits on a small bench and thinks about all the happiness his daughter brought him. Every morning, he goes into her room as if she were still there. ‘Morning, Claire,’ he will say, just as he always used to. ‘Are you OK? Do you want a cup of tea?’

There have been times when he has felt as if the grief was going to overwhelm him. One evening, a few months after Claire died in October 2017, he was alone in a hotel room when dark thoughts crowded in. He felt as if he wanted to die. He felt as if he could no longer cope with what had happened. He fell to his knees, screaming and banging and hammering at the floor.

Nokes has been Cardiff City’s club doctor for the last 20 years, travelling home and away with the team. ‘If I seriously wanted to kill myself, I had all the drugs in my medical box to do it easily,’ he says. He didn’t go through with it. He thought about his wife and his son, mainly. And he says there is another reason why he is still here. ‘The club saved me,’ he says. ‘Football saved me.’

Claire was 24 and apparently in good health when she got up off the sofa at her best friend’s house just after Christmas 2016 and collapsed. Her friend thought she had fainted but she had gone into cardiac arrest, brought on by an undiagnosed condition called myocarditis. Nokes arrived at the house just after the paramedics.

After some time, Claire’s heart, which had stopped, was shocked back into rhythm and she was taken to the Heath hospital in Cardiff. Her initial prognosis was cautiously optimistic but gradually it became apparent that she had suffered a hypoxic brain injury and had fallen into a vegetative state. She never regained consciousness.

The next nine months felt like a living hell for Nokes and his family. Claire’s condition did not improve and her body was wracked by medullary storms, prolonged spasms that caused her limbs to contort and spread a pained expression across her face. Sometimes, she appeared agitated or in distress. Whether she was actually in pain, no one knew.

It was against this backdrop of unremitting suffering that Nokes found solace in the football club. ‘He is such a lovely man,’ Cardiff boss Neil Warnock says. ‘ The players love him. He’s like a counsellor as well as a doctor. And a marriage guidance adviser. He’s everything. He’s a shoulder for the young lads. And a shoulder for the older lads. The doc can be one of the forgotten people at a football club but it’s not like that with Len.’ When Nokes went back to work a few weeks after Claire’s cardiac arrest, he was overwhelmed by the reaction from the players and the rest of the staff. Many wrapped him in bear hugs. Several of the players wept. ‘I felt genuine love from everyone,’ Nokes says. Some months later, Warnock, the club skipper Sean Morrison and defender Sol Bamba, men that Nokes calls ‘colossus figures at the club’ went to Rookwood, a specialist rehabilitation centre in Llandaff, where Claire was being cared for, to open a garden and to meet her.

On the night before she died, Bamba drove to Rookwood straight after a Cardiff home game against Derby County. Nokes knew how gravely ill Claire was by that stage and, worried that Bamba would be upset by her condition, tried to persuade him to stay away. Bamba turned up anyway and sat by her bedside alone.

‘ Sol is a lovely spirit, a caring person,’ Nokes says in Only Time Will Tell, the book he has written, with the skilled help of Cardiff ’s director of communications, Mark Denham, about Claire’s death. ‘We left him on his own with Claire and, when he came out, I could see he had been crying. We walked off the ward along the corridor and into the night and I could see that he was clearly distressed.’

Bamba still remembers that night vividly, too. ‘It is easy sometimes for people to look at football clubs as a collection of individuals,’ he says. ‘But at the best clubs, they are like a family. What was important for us was to be there for Len. We are part of a family altogether. I have got daughters, too. That night, I felt I needed to be there.’

Claire’s funeral was the day before Cardiff played an away game at Middlesbrough but the players insisted they would not start the journey north until they had attended. They asked for permission to turn up in their track suits and Nokes happily agreed.

‘It made me laugh,’ he says. ‘I pictured Claire l ooking down, loving the attention and laughing, too.’ Cardiff were promoted at the end of that season. In the dressing room after t he game against Reading that confirmed their place in the Premier League, Morrison wrapped his arms around Nokes again. ‘She has been looking down on us,’ the Cardiff skipper told him. ‘She made sure we did it.’

Last season, more tragedy hit Cardiff. Their new signing, Emiliano Sala, died when the light plane in which he was travelling crashed into the English Channel. Nokes was one of the few people at the club who had met him.

‘I was there for his medical,’ he says. ‘He seemed like a lovely guy. He was more than a name on a piece of paper to me.’

Another new season began for Nokes yesterday.

He travelled north with Cardiff for the opening game of their Championship campaign against Wigan. There is something soothing for him about the rhythms the game brings and the camaraderie of football.

‘I meet people at the cemetery sometimes who lost their loved ones 15 years ago,’ he says. ‘And they say that the grief they feel has not changed. I don’t know if I will be like that. I do know that I miss Claire so much. I do know that I still cry on a regular basis. But without football, without the club, I don’t know how I would have found the strength to stand up again.’

ONLY TIME WILL TELL is available from the Cardiff City Store. For more information, see: www.cardiffcityfcstore.com