Wednesday 1 June 2016 09:21, UK
England World Cup winner George Cohen has added his voice to calls for football to tackle the issue of head injuries.
Brain disease and football have been discussed in the same breath ever since former England and West Brom striker Jeff Astle died of a degenerative brain disease in 2002, aged 59.
A coroner described his illness as an "industrial disease", a clear reference to his forte of heading the ball.
Since then a spate of ex-players have come forward with similar problems, including Cohen's 1966 World Cup-winning team-mates Jack Charlton, Martin Peters, Nobby Stiles and Ray Wilson.
Cohen put that down to old-style leather footballs and told the Daily Telegraph: "You felt sick sometimes when it hit you. They started out at 14 to 16 ounces but, with rain, they were two or three pounds.
"Even if it hit you on the side of the head, a graze, it was really uncomfortable. The nearer you were to it, the less likely it was to hurt you but when the balls were going at full momentum...
"Those early balls were really rather nasty. I remember sometimes being in a wall defending a free-kick and you have got to stand there. Some players put their head in the way. I never moved out of the way but I always thought, 'This is going to bloody well hurt'.
"You are protected by your skull but what happens is [the brain] wobbles from side to side. And if the ball hit you from the sky when you were still on the ground, the feeling would go right through to your feet."
Dawn Astle, Jeff's daughter, has been campaigning for more research into the matter and was told by the FA and PFA in late 2014 that they were talking to FIFA.
The FA will now press on with domestic partners having decided that "solely UK-based research" may be the best and quickest approach.
Cohen said: "It's obvious that something is wrong. There are a number of our 1966 team affected but in the past, I have noticed going back a long, long way that some of our players have dementia and Alzheimer's.
"The FA and PFA could work together on it. Jeff Astle died in 2002. What sorts of other indications do you need?"
Dr Michael Grey, a motor neuroscience physiologist at the University of Birmingham, believes the issue cannot be associated only with past generations and told the Telegraph the velocity of the ball is more significant than its mass.
"The heavy leather balls, in my opinion, is a massive red herring," he said. "The issue is the amount of energy imparted on the head by the ball.
"There is a formula for kinetic energy, one half mass times velocity squared. The more important part of that equation is the velocity squared. We know players are bigger, stronger and kicking the ball faster. So the amount of energy in the ball may be even more.
"Also, think about how a brain injury is caused. Most injuries are from head-to-head [collisions]."
