Family of Ron Saunders blame football for dementia diagnosis

One of only two surviving English managers to have won the First Division or Premier League title has been diagnosed among the hundreds of former footballers with dementia.

Ron Saunders, who led Aston Villa to the Division One title in 1981 as well as two League Cups during a career that also included spells at Manchester City, Birmingham, West Bromwich Albion and Norwich City, has been living at a care home near Solihull since May.

A centre-forward during a playing career in which he also scored more than 200 goals, Saunders is now 85 but has been suffering symptoms for two decades. His son, Ronnie, believes that there is a contributory link between the dementia and his playing days with Everton, Gillingham, Portsmouth, Watford and Charlton Athletic.

The Daily Telegraph reported last week that Saunders’s former Portsmouth team-mate Rod Taylor had been diagnosed in a post-mortem with chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) and dementia with lewy bodies following his death in April. CTE can only be caused by head trauma and he is the second British footballer after Jeff Astle to be identified with the disease. However, an anonymous University College London study of six former British players with dementia also find CTE in four cases last year and there have been hundreds of proven cases among American footballers. It is a condition that can only be identified after death, with both Astle and Taylor having been diagnosed by the Glasgow neuropathologist Dr Willie Stewart who is now leading research into the prevalence of dementia among former players and has also launched a brain donation scheme.

In an interview with The Portsmouth News, Ronnie described how his father and the Saunders family had been affected by dementia. “I saw it starting 20-odd years ago, there were certain things dad did which made us realise,” he said. “Unfortunately he’s like a lot of other pros - in a nursing home for their last days. We knew his brain was quite damaged. We feel quite lucky he has lasted this long because we never thought he would. Mum couldn’t cope with him any more, his brain has gone.

“I know him, if he had known this was going to happen to him it would be, ‘You put a pillow over my head’. He knows who we are. If he sees me, he knows exactly who I am, but that’s it. Then the conversation is completely dead.

“It crept up very slowly, now he struggles with every aspect of his life, everything he does. There hasn't been a quality of life for dad over the last four or five years. No quality of life at all.”

Taylor’s family have described the “brutal” training regime of that era, when players would even head medicine balls to strengthen their neck muscles, but there is also concern that everyday heading, collisions and the sheer physicality of football are contributory factors. The Jeff Astle Foundation have been contacted by around 400 families of former players who are suffering with dementia and Ronnie Saunders does believe that there is a link to football.

“I know Jeff Astle’s daughter, Dawn, and she told me a survey showed that most ill centre-forwards and centre-halves have some form of brain problem,” said Ronnie. “His brain has been damaged and I think heading balls has contributed. He treated the game as a trade, he saw it as a job. He pushed himself and enjoyed it, like a boxer who doesn’t mind getting hit. In a funny way, he relished the physical pain of pushing himself, especially in pre-season training, and took that into management.

“As a family, he wouldn’t speak to us an hour before the game. That was the rule, ‘If you see me, no-one speak to me’. If I did he wouldn’t have heard me, unless it was business talk. His focus was unbelievable, as a player and a manager.”

The Jeff Astle Foundation and the Taylor family are now calling on the football authorities and the government to recognise certain types of dementia among former footballers as an industrial disease.