"It was late in the afternoon of November 28, 2012, a cold Wednesday afternoon that presaged a hard frost, when a young policeman came knocking at Margaret Hardman’s front door. The news not surprisingly made her hysterical: her son, Tom, she was told, had died in his sleep the night before.
Mother and son had spoken on the phone only the day before. Tom was due to come home at the weekend for a double celebration, his nephew’s first birthday and his own 22nd, which was in five days’ time. As ever, he had sounded fit, full of life and vital: he was one of those types, according to his mum, who loved sport, any sport: football, roller hockey, cricket, anything. “Cricket was his passion though,” she says.
Tom was a promising young Lancashire cricketer with much to look forward to in sport and life. He had played in the county’s academy and second XI and had moved to Leeds Metropolitan University where he played first-class cricket for the university team, had been appointed captain for the following season and was in the process of completing a degree in sports science. Ironically, he loved the fitness sessions, the bleep tests and learning about the science of the body, including the heart.
Gary Yates, now in charge of Lancashire’s academy, but coach of the second XI when Tom played a few games, remembers him as “an excellent lad with a superb attitude” who was “very well liked”. He was a promising all-rounder; a middle-order batsman and seamer. He had played a couple of first-class games, with a top score of 44, and had taken three wickets, including that of Tom Maynard, another young cricketer whose life was cruelly cut short. There was much more to come, for him and the team that dominated the university cricket scene the following season.
Then, from nowhere, tragedy. On the night of November 27 he went to sleep and didn’t wake up. His housemates assumed he had gone out in the morning and didn’t find him until early in the afternoon, hence the late arrival of the policeman to his mum’s home. There was no history of heart trouble, no genetic problem to the family’s knowledge. A post-mortem examination produced no unusual findings with his heart and so his death was put down to SADS (sudden arrhythmic death syndrome). For whatever reason, his heart had simply stopped working one night and that was that. “The electrical current just stopped,” says Mrs Hardman.
When I spoke to Mrs Hardman on Tuesday, hours after the news of James Taylor’s retirement from a heart condition, she was not aware of what had happened to Taylor. Her immediate reaction was to give thanks that Taylor is still alive and relief that the symptoms of the illness, which Taylor experienced during Nottinghamshire’s match against Cambridge last week, led to the kind of testing that is common now among young sportsmen. The loss of a cricket career? Not many people, perhaps, can put that in perspective. Mrs Hardman can.
For many families in bereavement, a sort of solace can be sought in helping others, and the Hardman family have been involved with the charity CRY (Cardiac Risk in the Young) since Tom’s death. There was a memorial fund set up in Tom’s name and a year ago 200 people in the vicinity of his neighbourhood, some with links to Leeds Metropolitan University, Lancashire CCC, friends and family were tested courtesy of that fund. A red flag of sorts was raised with about 20 of those, who then had to go for more scans or tests. “If we can help to save a life or two then that’s something,” Mrs Hardman says. Cricketers of a certain age will look with bemusement at the kind of testing done these days, but cricket has long been aware of its responsibilities in this regard. The ECB, for example, has been testing its players for heart conditions since 2008, although after Taylor’s news it is considering strengthening its provision further for older players. Most are not tested frequently after 21, and Taylor had not been tested for three years.
CRY has been instrumental in pushing counties to test their young players as well, despite the added cost to stretched budgets. Most counties routinely test their academy players (my son, just 14, coincidentally received a letter from Middlesex last week inviting him for testing) and their young contracted cricketers who are under 21 years old get annual testing. It gets less frequent thereafter, although that, too, may change now.
The benefits are obvious from a brief look at CRY’s website, where page after page of young smiling faces stare out at you. Of course, it is only the well known that you get to hear about generally. Miles Frost, for example, David Frost’s son, who collapsed when out jogging and died of hypertrophic cardiomyopathy last year. Sportsmen are three to six times more likely to die if a heart condition goes undiagnosed, because of the extreme pressure put upon the organ, and as people take increasingly to fitness and extreme sports, numbers outside of professional sport are likely to rise.
Testing and screening is vital, then, as Taylor’s predicament this week has emphasised. An interesting case in cricket is that of Calum Haggett, a young cricketer who played with Jos Buttler in the England Under-19 side and at Somerset, who was found to have a heart problem during a routine screening in 2010. He had open-heart surgery and has been able to continue his career, now with Kent. On his shirt, he carries the CRY logo and that of the Ben Daniels Memorial Fund, Ben being one of 12 young people that CRY says die each week because of undetected heart problems.
But even then unexplained tragedies will happen. Sometimes there is neither rhyme nor reason, as the Hardman family know. At least Taylor’s warning came just in time."
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Topic: James Taylor Retires (Read 7285 times)