After losing his best friend and almost his own life in a car crash, it seemed Alistair Patrick-Heselton’s football career was over so it will be an emotional day if he can lead Team GB to Paralympic glory, writes Peter Thompson.
When Alistair Patrick-Heselton was involved in a serious car accident, his life was hanging in the balance. Six years later the former Queens Park Rangers striker hopes to cap his remarkable recovery by winning gold at the Paralympic Games in September.
Alistair was left in a coma, his best friend Simon Patterson was killed and another passenger was seriously injured after the car they were travelling in smashed into barriers on the A40 in London back in September 2006.
Alistair was thrown through the window of the vehicle but he remembers nothing of the tragic accident which left him with a fractured skull and doctors fearing he would suffer severe brain damage and never be able to walk again at the age of 23.
“From the accident going back a year I have patches where I don’t remember anything,” says Alistair, who was a passenger in the car which was being driven by former Watford trainee Patterson.
“I woke up in the hospital and had no idea how I’d got there. They said I’d been out (in a coma) for such and such a time. To me it seemed like it was about three months, but that was from when I first had conscious memories. Apparently I’d been up doing things after about a month and a half, but I don’t remember any of that.”
Alistair, from Milton Keynes, was studying for a degree in quantity surveying and playing semi-professional football for Wingate & Finchley FC before the accident, but the future looked bleak when he came out of his coma.
He recalls: “I had been told I might not walkagain but I started walking towards the end of my time in hospital. I was told not to play football again and avoid contact sports full stop because of the state of my brain injury.
“It was very bad and sometimes just looking at me defies the state of the brain scans. They were showing someone that should have been a lot worse than I was. I had a compound stress fracture, which is when your skulls sinks and hits your brain. I had a couple of brain haemorrhages because of that and I’ve got a screw in my head, which will have to stay in there.”
Not only did he face a battle to get his life back on track and defy the doctors, Alistair was also grieving the loss of Patterson, his school friend and team-mate at Wingate & Finchley. But with determination to make a recovery and support from his family, he has shown the strength of character to defy what the doctors had told him.
Having been advised not to continue with his degree course, a determined Alistair went back to working in quantity surveying part-time but a love of cars then resulted in him acquiring a franchise with vehicle wrapping company Totally Dynamic, which he set up in Milton Keynes.
Alistair accepted the fact that his football days were over but four years since he had last kicked a ball, he received a telephone call from the Football Association to inform him that he was eligible to play cerebral palsy (CP) football.
He reveals: “On the off chance I got a call from the FA, because the England doctor Richard Wheeler has links with the people at Wingate and Finchley and they knew my story. Due to my head injury I would qualify to play in the CP and head trauma football team, so he passed on my contact details to the coach.
“I was very reluctant at the time, because I thought ‘well I haven’t played in so long and I’m not even going to be any good’. I was very nervous about it all and I’d been trying to make a new life without football, so I thought maybe I should leave it alone.
“They were very persuasive and given they’d paid me so much attention and showed they cared, I decided I should at least give it a chance. After the first training session I felt great and could see the knowledge of football was still there and my touch was thankfully still there, so I gave it a few goes and one thing led to another.”
As captain of the West Midlands 7-a-side team and an England international, the opportunity to play for Great Britain soon arose with the Paralympics on home soil on the horizon.
Alistair, who wears a head guard when he plays and avoids heading the ball as a precautionary measure, marked his England debut by scoring at the World Championships last year and was also on target in the final of the Paralympic World Cup in Manchester as Great Britain won silver after losing to Brazil.
Part of Jaguar’s Rising Stars programme which gives him a bursary to ensure he can combine training with running his business, Alistair is determined to win a medal at the Paralympics. If he does find himself on the podium in September, he expects to shed a tear or two with his friends and family watching on.
He says: “It can’t get any bigger than that (playing at the Paralympics). I do think we’ve got a very good chance of getting a medal. It’s going to be very difficult because the top few sides are very good sides, they’re full-time.
That doesn’t mean we haven’t got a chance, we know the task ahead is tough but we believe we can do very well and get a medal.
“I try not to think about it too much because I can only imagine that when I am there on the podium, and I’m not an emotional guy, I can see myself dropping a few tears. It’s something that will be incredible and the biggest thing yet, I don’t really know the words to describe just how massive it’s going to be.”
Alistair will get married a month after the Paralympics and the manner in which he has bravely gone about rebuilding his life is truly inspirational.
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