Sky Sports star Hayley McQueen has opened up on the “awful” reality of her dad Gordon’s ongoing battle with dementia as investigations into football and the disease go on.
The Manchester United icon and a member of the 1983 FA Cup winning side was diagnosed with vascular dementia back in early 2021. His family have since rallied around him and have been attempting to raise awareness of the disease and its symptoms.
Speaking on Good Morning Britain, Hayley has opened up on her Dad’s current welfare and the heart-breaking realities of having a family member suffer with dementia. She said: “He’s completely bedridden, which is awful.
“Big, strapping man in bed. He watches a lot of football, not current day. He has a lot of football friends popping by, we’ve had lots of his ex-teammates come by.
“He knows who we all are which is very weird because I associate dementia not having a clue with what on Earth is going on or who anyone is and I quite like that fact from a selfish point of view.
"But part of me is almost ‘well if he didnt know who we were, where we were, it maybe wouldn’t be so hard to think about maybe one day potentially when he has to go into a home, at least he doesn’t know where he is or what’s going on’. Whereas, he’s very aware. It’s like he’s locked in himself.”
McQueen, now 70, is just the latest in a long line of former footballers suffering with dementia. His former Leeds team-mate Jack Charlton died in 2020 due to the disease, whilst numerous members of England’s 1966 World Cup winning side have also been diagnosed.
Since her Dad’s diagnosis, Hayley admitted that her and her family had a dilemma on their hands over whether to tell him.
“We actually found out that he had dementia and we were given the diagnosis, we debated whether we’d tell him or not,” she told. “Because we were like ‘if we don’t tell him, he’s never going to know and if we tell him do we then have to remind him every day that he’s got dementia?’
“We weren’t going to tell him and then we were sat in the hospital and they were like ‘okay Gordon, this is how we deal with dementia’ and we thought ‘oh gosh, okay right well that’s that then’.
“He just said ‘I don’t want to get worse, I want to get better’ and we had to sit and say ‘well I don’t think you’re going to get better but we’re going to try and make everything as good as it can be and we’ll be there for you and be around you’.
“I’d just had a baby so I was dealing with the emotions of all of that. I lived four-and-a-half, five hour drives from my parents in the north-East because I obviously worked down in the south-West so that was tough knowing I was so far away and a little bit helpless.
“Covid then happened which meant I couldn’t see my family and all of these people my dad enjoyed being around, weren’t able to be around him.”
The daughter of West Bromwich Albion legend Jeff Astle has been appealing for authorities to launch an investigation to look at the link between brain injuries and heading a football. Surprisingly, McQueen has suggested that her Dad is not totally convinced that has been a factor.
“My dad says no,” she said. “I’m like ‘what the heck, you’re in this state’”
