Kevin Doyle: 'Doctors said I could have been suffering concussion for 13 years'

Former Premier League striker Kevin Doyle has been told by doctors that he was probably suffering from concussion without realising it throughout his 13-year career, before heading the ball started making him feel continually dazed and nauseous.

In his first in-depth discussion of his retirement due to concussion, the Republic of Ireland international said that specialists in the United States, where he had been playing for Colorado Rapids, told him that if he had taken a two-week rest after bangs to the head earlier in his career, he may not now be experiencing the problems which have led him to quit.

'I was never officially concussed my whole career until this year, [though] obviously I'd had bangs [earlier] and been knocked out on the pitch where I would have been concussed. It wasn't a thing five or 10 years ago,' Doyle, who previously played for Wolves and Reading, told the Irish television channel RTE.

It is 'a good thing that there's becoming more awareness,' he added, in a week when the Alan Shearer BBC documentary on the links between football and dementia brought significant attention to a subject which The Mail on Sunday has been campaigning on for years.

Doyle, 34, said he thought that it was odd when he felt unwell every time he headed a ball 18 months ago, but carried on in the hope of shaking the problem off.

'I felt a bit odd and had a dazed feeling,' he said. 'To begin with, I didn't really correlate it with heading. I'd come in after training and wouldn't feel well. After a while I started to realise that every time I head the ball, I'm not feeling great.

'When you're a player, if your muscles are feeling good, your legs are feeling good, you don't care about anything else. I thought, "I can get through the week without heading".'

Doyle began dropping out of finishing drills in training and avoiding heading outside of matches, hoping that after a three-month post-season break the problem would go away.

But he returned to training in January, and immediately became concussed again after a collision with his own goalkeeper.

He saw a neurologist but did not disclose the full nature of his previous problems for fear that he would be prevented from playing.

It was after a second concussion — when a clearance by LA Galaxy's Ashley Cole hit him on the head — that he explained his symptoms in full to medics.

Of the goalkeeper collision, he said: 'I shouldn't have got a concussion from it, it was a simple collision. I had a bad concussion and I'd never had a bad concussion from a simple collision before. That worried me.

'In America, they're very good. Straight away, [you're] not allowed to train, not allowed to play. You go see a neurologist.

'I didn't tell him about my heading issues because you know deep down that if you tell them they're not going to let you play.'

The Cole incident worried him enough to have a full talk with neurologists, who said he could encounter repeated concussion if he continued playing.

'You get stuck with headaches, you get stuck with feeling sick, you get stuck feeling a bit depressed, basically. You're like in a "funk", they call it. You're not right.

'That was the prognosis, he said, that could happen. I sought a second opinion but the doctors agreed.'