There were times where he used to drop me off at school
in a nice little car...
Footballer's car?
Yeah, and he just pulled into the playground, everyone's like...
All the younger kids.
[Stadium announcer] Scorer of Stevenage Borough's goal
No.11 Mitchell Cole.
I mean, comparing him to Ashley Cole as a nine, ten-year-old
Ashley Cole was a tremendous goalscorer,
Mitchell was on the same level as him as a kid of that age.
He signed pro at West Ham, got a lovely contract,
signed on the pitch against Bolton.
There was a time when they announced it over the speakers
at school that he'd been picked for England.
When he got to about 16, he was going to play for England...
…and he collapsed.
We took him to the doctors and they came up with this heart condition.
Hypertrophic Cardiomyopathy.
First time you ever heard those words I guess?
First time I'd ever heard those words.
Cardiomyopathy is an abnormality of heart muscle.
So you have a left heart and right heart,
so if you're talking about the left heart
you can have thickening of the heart muscle,
we call that Hypertrophic Cardiomyopathy.
Our aim is to get the general term out there because it's quite...
the length of the word 'Cardiomyopathy', it's a bit of a barrier.
People think, cardiac arrest or heart failure
but we really want to get the name out there
and make people aware that there is a specific set of conditions.
When he said, 'I'm going back playing,
I've got a contract at Grays', what did you think?
What could I think really? It was his life.
So this is where it all began for Mitchell Cole, right here.
Yep, right here.
One of the last babies to be born in St. Bart's,
they closed it after he was born.
They closed it after he was born?
Yeah.
I hope not because of Mitchell?
No, no, no.
When he grew into a footballer,
you wouldn't have thought that of him when he was tiny.
He was the sensitive one.
Always held back.
Ben was the one that was there
Mitchell would stand back and watch to see if Ben did it first.
Right.
And then Mitchell would follow.
You were close as siblings?
Yeah, we were very close.
A lot of big brother banter.
If you'd come out in a t-shirt that was a bit questionable,
he'd be on you straight away.
So, the Alice band would be another one?
Yeah, definitely.
One day, I went to watch him, me and my wife,
I went to Wales, and this was about one o'clock,
I thought, 'we've got plenty of time'.
But I was in south Wales.
So I ended up getting to Mitchell's game
ten minutes from the end,
and that's when he scored, got man of the match,
and I couldn't bring myself to say to Mitchell...
But he said, 'dad, wasn't I great'?
I said, 'brilliant Mitch'.
Yeah, but that was a great day.
Well, he was a piss-taker.
I remember he used to take the piss out of me a lot.
When I was younger, I didn't like him that much.
When I was little.
I remember him taking the piss out of me but,
as you get older, you get on that level, on the banter level.
You can say something back to him.
You can chuck things back.
But he was just a laugh, he'd come up with witty one liners.
When were you aware of his talent?
When he was four and a half.
Four and a half?
Yeah, we went to Butlin's and a friend of ours
said, 'he can come and play for my team'.
He had a good left foot on him.
He was the star of the team.
School teams…
School teams, district teams, everything.
I mean people couldn't believe how he could take a corner at
12 years old, it'd be straight in the net.
They'd say he hit it like a man.
Mitchell Cole signed for West Ham as a teenager,
turned down Arsenal, scored at Wembley
and played in the same England team as Wayne Rooney.
He was born and raised near Mitchell Street in north London.
I saw Mitchell, he was playing for
Islington's primary school against Tower Hamlets
I was the Tower Hamlets Primary School manager,
and he was absolutely brilliant.
What stood him out as a good player at that age?
Well, he had a great touch, great enthusiasm,
good on the ball, confident...
He was very nippy, little left winger.
I took him to Chelsea, he had trials under Bernie Dixon,
West Ham were after him as well.
But he decided to go to West Ham with Jimmy Tindall and Jimmy Anson
because of all the boys they were producing at the time.
I took Mitchell to America as well,
I remember one time we were at a football tournament
and one of the coaches said he would buy Mitchell a pizza
For every goal he scored.
Mitchell scored 13 goals.
So, the guy bought 13 pizzas which they all shared around with the kids.
I think the great times were when I'd pick them two up from school
and I used to take Mitchell to football training straight to West Ham.
At about four o'clock, we used to go to McDonald's first.
Ideal pre-match preparation.
Oh, he had to have his little burger first.
So we've got Mitchell there,
and then Rooney there.
You can definitely recognise Rooney there.
Yeah.
One of his former managers described him as,
every bit as good as Ryan Giggs when he was a younger player.
Yeah, that's who he used to get compared to a lot.
2008 so that's…
When he got to about 16, he was going to play for England,
And he collapsed.
It was the early hours of the morning, and I heard a bang.
I thought, 'what's that'?
I went to push the door of the bathroom and I couldn't open it.
I said, 'what's the matter Mitch'?
Then, when I opened the door he was just getting up
and said, 'oh, I just slipped'. He didn't tell me he had a seizure.
Anyway, he cut his head open.
We had to put a plaster on it.
We went down to the football
and they said, 'what's the matter Mitch'?
He said, 'Oh, I just hit my head on the cupboard'.
Otherwise they wouldn't have let him play.
We took him to the doctors,
we wanted him checked.
It was Valentine's Day.
And they came up with this heart condition.
He was 15,16.
Hypertrophic Cardiomyopathy.
First time you ever heard those words I guess?
First time I'd ever heard those words.
I went home and Googled it,
cried my eyes out.
A Sudden Cardiac Death is a tragic and shocking event.
It leaves behind devastated family members,
friends and in the case of a talented young footballer, his fans too.
But what is Sudden Cardiac Death?
Why does it appear so common in football?
And is there anything to prevent it?
So we're just going to start doing the screening today,
and what we're going to be doing here…
Professor John Somauroo is a consultant cardiologist
and a specialist in inherited cardiac conditions – or cardiomyopathies.
He is a member of the FA's cardiac screening panel
and is the cardiologist to Liverpool Football Club.
He also works with British Cycling,
where today he is conducting a cardiac screening
with double Olympic Gold Medallist Philip Hindes.
What is Cardiomyopathy?
Cardiomyopathy is an abnormality of heart muscle.
So you have a left heart and right heart,
so if you're talking about the left heart
you can have thickening of the heart muscle,
we call that Hypertrophic Cardiomyopathy.
That's the one seen in one in 500 of the population.
Or you can have a problem where the heart muscle has actually
thinned and the whole chamber of the heart
the left ventricle, gets much bigger and poorly functioning,
we call that a Dilated Cardiomyopathy.
Are you born with it?
You're not actually born with the condition,
but you may well have a gene and
one of the genes may well express itself later in life.
It may well express itself around the times of puberty,
going into 14, 15, 16 onwards and that's a time that
we would tend to start screening people.
That's when you may well pick up this condition.
So you're not born with it but you're born with
the preponderance to develop it because you've got the genetic profile.
Mitchell's talent brought him to the attention of all of London's big clubs.
He eventually signed terms at West Ham,
where he was involved in the first-team's pre-season
alongside the likes of Jermain Defoe, Mark Noble and Michael Carrick.
After it was confirmed that Mitchell had a Hypertrophic Cardiomyopathy,
he was told that he couldn't play for West Ham.
They offered to pay Mitchell for the duration of his contract
and he opted to leave.
So then he sat around for eight months not doing anything
and he put on a little bit of weight, went out drinking a bit
was binging – he didn't know where his life was going.
He was going out with, obviously Charly, Joe Cole's sister.
Went on holiday and they bumped into the Grays Athletic manager.
It was Micky Woodward, he owned Grays Athletic at the time.
So he said, 'bring him down',
So he went down, signed straight away.
Loved it – star of the show he was.
Mitchell had got his career on track.
He moved up from non-league with Grays Athletic to League One
and the Championship with Southend.
A loan spell at Northampton Town preceded a move to Stevenage Borough.
When he said, 'I'm going back playing
I've got a contract at Grays', what did you think?
What could I think really? It was his life.
He was entitled to live it how he wanted to
and he had a smile on his face.
By becoming athletic you put some huge stresses on your heart,
and we've seen from some of the screenings that we've done that
we find that all chambers of the heart get very big.
And also the muscle wall gets thicker as well.
In general it's around one per 100,000 athletes that will potentially
have a serious event.
Now, if you start playing sport and you have a pre-existing condition,
then it actually may well treble or even quadruple your risk.
Would you say this is the highlight? The career highlight?
The FA Trophy, yeah, definitely.
Scoring at Wembley, the new Wembley.
Tell us a little bit about that day at Wembley.
2-0 down at half-time I thought,
'we might not get back into this'.
But there was an inkling in me and thought
there was something special here.
Mitchell got the first goal, which got us back into it and then
Obviously 'Dobbo' [Craig Dobson] scored then
[Steve] Morrison in the 89th minute
wins it for us. To come back from 2-0 down to win 3-2
it was truly a momentous day for us.
One of the best days in my personal life of supporting Stevenage.
Young players, professional footballers and even those
who had left the official training systems
are at increased risk of dying suddenly from an underlying heart condition.
That's according to a recently published ten-year study
carried out by the FA alongside Cardiac Risk in the Young.
The study analysed around 11,000 young players, aged 16-17.
The scholars at that age are screened.
They have that questionnaire, the ECG and the heart scan done.
Potentially, now we've seen our data we would suggest
and is now going to be implemented that
two years later at the age of 18, and again at the age of 20
and again at the age of 25, to have the questionnaire and the EGC done.
So pop your arms down by your side, just as relaxed as you can get.
One in 266, that's 42 players were diagnosed with a condition
associated with young sudden cardiac death,
such as Hypertrophic Cardiomyopathy.
Almost three quarters were able to return to play
showing that a diagnosis during screening
does not have to mean the end of a sporting career.
Does screening catch everything?
Screening won't catch everything and again in our study
We did find that there were a group of athletes,
there were six athletes who died
that previously had had normal cardiac screening.
So, of the 11,000 athletes, there were those six that died
who'd previously had screening.
Five of those died of a Cardiomyopathy – a heart problem.
One we're unsure as to why he died, probably a rhythm problem.
So they had the cardiac screening done.
Now you could argue that we've missed a screening,
but if you think about it, the screening was done at the age of 16
and some of those actually died about 11 years later.
The mean age of death after screening was about seven years.
So in answer to your question, screening probably did pick
up the conditions early on, and if we had repeated the screening
every two to four years we may well have
picked up those other people as well.
After helping Stevenage to promotion, Mitchell was back in league football,
signing for Oxford United in 2010.
But over time his condition worsened.
By that stage Mitchell had a young family of his own,
and wasn't prepared to risk his life for the professional game.
He played a few games I think then he struggled to get in the team.
He wasn't feeling fit then I suppose?
No, he wasn't feeling fit, he was getting more and more out of breath.
That's when he got a bit frightened because they showed him…
The progression of it…
Yeah, and I think then he realised he had to give up professional football.
But he still couldn't leave the ball alone.
And he was at Arlesey [Town], and he was in the bar after the game,
when he saw Fabrice Muamba collapse.
And he decided then – that's it.
He couldn't even play that football anymore.
He'd never go and set foot on a pitch again?
He couldn't even play that football anymore.
But he used to come down here on a Friday night…
With his cousins…
Go over to the leisure centre…
Have a kickabout.
It was sort of a combination of my friends from all over.
Associates.
Yeah.
And it just expanded.
Everyone loved it.
Then after, we'd all go back to the pub and have a piss up.
So it was a win-win situation.
You're still in your football stuff, so it was good.
You're all smelly and sweaty,
but it was a smelly, sweaty pub anyway so it's fine, they let us in.
I don't know if you want to talk about it but
what do you remember about that evening?
Do you know what I remember? It was freezing.
He'd come home, the Christmas tree was up.
He's come up, he's had his bit of banter with Ben, as they do.
He's left the house, quarter to eight I think it was.
Mitchell Cole died on Friday 30th November 2012.
On the very same pitch he first played on as a child,
just a few metres from the house he was raised in.
And then I saw everyone crowding…
And then it just weird, wasn't it?
It was like slow motion.
I was up the other end, I was like, 'what's going on'?
Did you know of his trouble?
Yeah.
Did you ever think, today could be the day?
Oh, it happened 100 percent.
You never know, as they say, it's your last game.
But with his condition you don't expect it
because you don't want to fear the worst.
I don't think you sit there thinking about it the whole time.
Obviously, you'll think about it, but you won't sit there
thinking, 'oh my god, he's running, should he be running'?
He wouldn't be sprinting, up down, up down.
No, what he'd do is he'd run and then you'd see him take a break.
That's how he played.
He'd get his breath back and he'd
get the ball, he'd go, 'doob, doob, doob, bam, score'.
The five [a-side], 8-a-side pitches are not that big.
Was he conscious after that?
No.
When the heart that's gone into an abnormal rhythm
is left in an abnormal rhythm you don't get blood to your brain.
So within three minutes,
you'll be brain dead. You'll have irreversible brain damage
unless you can restart the heart.
So if you can apply one of these AEDs [Automated External Defibrillators]
and it automatically shocks the heart back to a normal rhythm
you may well restore the blood supply,
having now got a normal rhythm
and you can diffuse the brain.
Now, you have to do that in combination with
Cardio Pulmonary Resuscitation, or CPR at the same time
and it's been shown that if you do the two together
you can increase the chance of survival from just CPR at five percent.
CPR plus defibrillators can be 50 percent – you can increase survival.
However, there's a few down sides here so if you delay the time
at which you introduce a defibrillator by nine minutes
it's only 10 percent survival.
Whereas if you can do it within one minute, it's 90 percent survival.
So, the most important thing here, the key here is timing.
Ben didn't play with you that night?
Ben didn't play.
That was the one night he had off.
I had one missed call from my cousin,
He just said, 'look Ben I think you should come down'.
I was like, 'yeah, ok what's happened?
'Oh, nothing to worry about…'
He didn't give you the…
No, no, he was like, 'it's nothing to worry about, just come down,
we've called an ambulance, Mitchell's collapsed'.
Then as a I got there the ambulance was there.
We've got to the hospital,
they've got him out, rushed him into resus.
I was literally the only one there because the ambulance went straight through.
They were working on him for about 5-10 minutes...
Then one of the doctors came over with the readouts of his heart…
And just told me the news.
Obviously, didn't know what to do so I was there on my own.
Being told this news
on my own.
But in me, when I found out, I didn't want to be there
when everyone else found out, if that makes sense…
Because I knew, especially my mum…
By quarter past eight, Ben rang me and said,
'have you heard from anybody'?
I said, 'no'.
You were still in the house then? Yeah.
He said, 'Mitchell's collapsed,' so we came running around here,
the ambulance was here...
That was it.
When you hear he's collapsed…
Yeah, that was my worst nightmare.
Before Mitchell passed away he became involved
with raising awareness of Hypertrophic Cardiomyopathy.
He appeared extensively on TV and radio in the UK,
and went to the United States sharing his story.
The Mitchell Cole Memorial Tournament is now in its sixth year
and organised by Stevenage fan group leader Keith Bell as well as Ben Cole.
Ben has also run the London Marathon
and climbed Kilimanjaro for Cardiomyopathy UK.
What made Mitchell a player that was worthy of honouring with a tournament?
With the heart condition it's something we could do for charity,
and Mitchell gave us really good times at Borough,
scoring at Wembley in the first ever final there.
And just plenty of memories in the Borough shirt and football in general.
Does this mean a lot to you boys?
We've been here every year.
Without a shadow of a doubt.
Take the trophy home for Mitchell?
Hopefully, yeah, we did it in the first year.
Was that the year when I scored…
We needed a win and I scored the last goal in the last second.
Yeah, make it about you.
I'm just saying to lift the trophy for Mitchell.
This is what this day's about – to raise awareness,
raise good money for a fantastic cause.
We had a really successful media campaign last year
called, 'My Heart Story'.
So, we were really encouraging people to know their heart history,
know if there are any heart issues in the family – back in the generations.
And for people to be aware of that and if they get tested to get tested.
Basically, we want to be there from the point of diagnosis.
So, if someone comes out of the room where they've just been
diagnosed we want to be there for them to catch them.
It's a tough diagnosis and if you look on Google,
It's going to tell you you've got five years to live – max.
That's not the case and we want people to live
the most fulfilling life they can.
Seven days after Mitchell Cole died, his youngest daughter was born.
And his brother and friends and his cousins
were back at the same pitch he'd died on.
They didn't want their last memory of their Friday night game
together to be the one of Mitchell dying.
He started playing his first game when he was
six years old on that pitch kicking about.
That's where he ended his life,
not in the ambulance, not at the hospital,
on that pitch.
He'd just had his 27th birthday.
He travelled the world, he went and stayed
at Shaun Goater's house in Bermuda.
When he was playing for England C? Yeah.
He had a great life.
He had a short life, but he had a great life.
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