Interview: Jamie Langfield, Aberdeen goalkeeper

Aberdeen keeper battling back from brain haemorrhage to near first-team return

IN THIS line of work, normally it’s all about groin strains and tweaks to the hamstring, or, at worst, ruptured knee ligaments. But sitting in a room just inside the Pittodrie front door as an Indian summer continues to gently bake the walls outside, it doesn’t take long to start to feel a little queasy. It’s not often that you find yourself taking notes as someone describes having a brain haemorrhage. The brave 31-year-old sitting opposite is relating a terrifying moment from May this year. When Jamie Langfield emerged from what he has learned was the first of three brain haemorrhage episodes he experienced a mixture of confusion and panic.

“When I was fitting I could not remember anything,” recalls the Aberdeen goalkeeper. “When I came round I was groggy. The worst part was going from the second to the third seizure. That was the hardest one, I thought I wasn’t coming back from that one. But they pumped this drug into me and I came round. It was a surreal experience, I was groggy but I had felt fine up to it. Then after it I was sitting up in my bed [in hospital] at about 7pm and felt fine again, but then was told what had happened – that I had a blood clot.”

Next week, he will undergo a procedure which he expects will clear the way for a return to first-team football, sooner rather than later. “It’s called an embolisation, and it’s when they go through the groin and feed a catheter up into the brain,” continues Langfield, as his interrogator fights with the urge to faint once more.

“I have got a thing called an AVM, which stands for arteriovenous malformation. You can get it at birth so they think I have had it all my life. It’s just unfortunate. It’s like a ticking time-bomb, it might never go off. Some people go all their lives and nothing happens, and for some people it can bleed and haemorrhage. That is what happened to myself. There are three ways to get it treated. Because of my profession it was thought that this [an embolisation] was the safest way and the quickest way to get it done.”

The other options were a craniotomy – an operation Chelsea goalkeeper Petr Cech underwent after he fractured his skull in a game against Reading five years ago – and also a radiotherapy procedure, which, Langfield explains, “is when they zap Gamma ray into your head through a strong X-ray machine.”

“You don’t know if that’s worked for about a year and a half, however,” he adds. “With what I am doing you are told there and then whether they have got it or not.”

Next Monday, when he checks himself back into Glasgow’s Southern General hospital, is another D-day in Langfield’s life, although he expects to be back in training again by the following week. He looks fit and healthy, and is back to his fighting weight. The only visible scar on his head dates back to a kick received from former team-mate Zander Diamond during a game at Hamilton Accies last season, and which many assumed had to be related to his subsequent seizures. However, Langfield quickly disabuses anyone of that notion.

With a wife, two beautiful daughters and the ink just drying on another year’s contract to keep goal for Aberdeen, Langfield thought he had all the angles covered. But no-one, not even an agile goalkeeper, could have anticipated the bolt from the blue which arrived while he slept. “Nothing causes it,” he says. “It just decides to do it itself. That’s the bottom line. That’s what I was worried about. If it was blood pressure, or if it was to do with a kick in the head, would I ever get back to playing football? But now we know what is it and that it is treatable I am just looking to the future.”

There won’t, he adds, be a need for any Cech-style headgear either upon his return to competitive football.

“I spoke to a consultant in Glasgow and he said there would be no need for it,” Langfield explains. “He said: ‘you have played football for the last 16 years and been kicked in the head on numerous occasions and it has not affected you’.”

There have been some changes. Langfield, always regarded as the joker in dressing rooms, has had to become a more inquisitive person of late. “You Google things,” he says. “It was worse when I didn’t know what it was. I was Googling ‘worst case scenario’, ‘best case scenario’. It was horrendous. I have been on the [AVM survivor] forums, and you see that people react differently to it. Some have gone on to live normal lives, others have re-bled. But I think it’s all about how you yourself deal with it.”

Understandably, he admits to having been made paranoid. “Anxiety does build up. But that isn’t helped by the drugs you are put on after the seizure. Everything I associate with my head now.”

Langfield is not alone in wishing to continue a professional sports career after having had a haemorrhage brought on by an AVM. Just early last month Mike Patterson, an American footballer with the Philadelphia Eagles, suffered one during training. He was back playing again within weeks. “I don’t think he bled, that sets you back a few months,” says Langfield. “You have to wait for the blood to disperse.” His own return is pencilled in for the new year, after current Aberdeen goalkeeper David Gonzalez has returned from his loan spell to Manchester City.

“It’s just about over the last hurdle now,” he adds of next Monday’s procedure, when a glue material will be injected by catheter.

He is still making himself useful, however. Last night Langfield was helping the Aberdeen media team provide commentary on the rescheduled league fixture with Dunfermline. The clot was in the left part of his skull, the area which, he explains, affects speech. But after 50 minutes of conversation there is no discernible sign of any impediment. He stops talking only to take glugs from a bottle of water, with re-hydration now an even more vital part of his regime.

While there has been an endless stream of well-wishers, his former Aberdeen manager Jimmy Calderwood was one of the first to get in touch. Langfield played the best football of his career under him, and made the worst mistakes too – both on and off the field. “It was Jimmy who took the gamble on me when I was second choice at Dunfermline,” he says. “I had been fading away from the game.

“I have so much respect for him. All the ups and downs are highlighted. But the good times outweigh the bad times by far.”

As bad times go when it comes to employers, they don’t come much worse than the notorious incident which occurred when Langfield, who was on his own stag do, bumped into his then boss Calderwood in a Magaluf street. The incident, which saw him slurring out some choice words not appreciated by his manager, was a nadir in their relationship. “It was something I brought on myself, it was one of these things which happens on your stag do,” says Langfield. “I probably won’t be the only guy who will ever do something stupid on his stag do while drunk. But I was just unfortunate to have bumped into the manager on my stag do.

“I mean, what are the chances of that? I knew he was going to Magaluf but when you are on a three or four day drinking session for your stag do, you don’t really think about that.”

Despite this almost comical piece of bad timing Langfield says he has much to be grateful for. He wasn’t sacked after the Magaluf incident for a start, Calderwood also relenting on a vow to sell him. There is also the relief at having signed a new one-year contract with Aberdeen just days before his first seizure. He has the comfort of being able to rely on the best physiotherapy treatment under John Sharp as he continues on a comeback that saw him make a surprise appearance among the substitutes for a recent game against Kilmarnock.

He is also fortunate that, when the brain haemorrhage hit, he was lying next to a qualified neuro nurse – his wife, Louise – in a bed in the home of his Glasgow-based in-laws, which meant a quick ambulance journey to the Southern General, home to one of Britain’s top neurological units.

He is thankful that he is with a club like Aberdeen, with Langfield having been made to feel that his recovery is a priority. Manager Craig Brown even told him that he could still count on being the club’s No 1. “It was great to hear, and then the gaffer goes out and brings in two goalies – and there are also two young boys – so I go from No 1 to No 5,” smiles Langfield. “Everyone at the club has been exceptional, and it’s great to have that kind of support. It’s a family club and you are well looked after.

“To still be sitting here after six years, there’s not many players do that – play at Aberdeen for six years,” he adds. “I am very grateful. I signed my contract here last summer. And it’s something I’d like to do again. I’d like to give something back.”

Yet it’s strange to hear Langfield talk about luck and feeling blessed. In the view of some, the goalkeeper once seemed a hapless individual. How else to explain the run of misfortune interspersed with enough sufficiently fine performances to be selected for Scotland squads by five – count ‘em – managers, going all the way back to Brown himself, in 2001.

There was the time that he managed to knock over a boiling kettle while on a bus to a pre-season tour in England, and which left him sidelined with a burnt foot for a few weeks. Then there’s the gaffes, and the high-profile maulings. Less than a year ago he lost nine goals at Parkhead, while Calderwood dropped him after he conceded five goals in successive matches against Celtic and Bayern Munich. “I feel sometimes I am a wee bit unfortunate,” he says, with admirable understatement. “But I will never stay down. I will keep on coming back.”

He made his big breakthrough in the Dundee team 11 years ago on the day Claudio Caniggia made his Dens Park debut against Motherwell. Robert Douglas, who Langfield had patiently understudied, had been sold days earlier. However, the 20-year-old Langfield lost two quick goals and had lost his place again by the next match. He was then placed on the redundancy list, along with the likes of Fabrizio Ravanelli and Craig Burley, when Dundee slid into administration three years later.

“It was literally a case of name read out, put your boots in a bag, get out the club,” he recalls. “I think ‘Rava’ knew his name was coming. He came out with one of the best quotes ever. He said: ‘It’s OK, I can go home to my big house in Italy and smoke a cigar but it is very unfair on the young boys here’.”

But then Langfield could have told Ravanelli that life isn’t fair. The goalkeeper’s struggles continued. Spells at Rochdale and Partick Thistle did not end with the permanent deals he had wished for, and then, when his luck looked to have improved following Calderwood’s decision to sign him at Dunfermline, Langfield was soon banging his fists on the table in frustration upon hearing the manager had promptly left, for Aberdeen.

Days later he learned that Derek Stillie, whose supposedly imminent departure from the Fife club had paved the way for Langfield to be installed as No 1, had changed his plans and re-signed again at East End Park. “But I dug my heels in,” says Langfield. “I remember playing all the reserve games like they were first team games, and Jimmy came back in for me.”

In six years at Pittodrie he has played 224 games. “It’s not bad,” he says. Now he is eyeing the most significant appearance of all – number 225.

It’s clear the events of the last four months have impacted on him beyond the obvious mental and physical strain. There are practical difficulties to overcome, such as the loss of his driving licence. The DVLA insist on AVM sufferers being free of seizures for a year before providing the all-clear to return to the roads. It means the saintly Louise has added glorified taxi driver her the list of chores, which include looking after two young daughters, Ruby and Maisie.

The transport predicament also saw Stirling Albion manager Jocky Scott being offered little encouragement when he enquired about the player’s availability, following Brown’s suggestion that Langfield might be allowed to go out on loan.

Given Langfield’s burning ambition, the drop to the Second Division might be too great. His great mentor Douglas made his debut for Scotland at the age of 30, while Jim Leighton, the goalkeeper coach he feels he works best with, played international football until his late thirties. “I like to set targets: get in the Aberdeen team, get up the league and work with Craig Levein,” says Langfield. “I believe in my ability, and I believe I can get back in the Scotland squad.”

The man dubbed ‘Clangers’ on the back pages of the tabloids is still determined to have the last laugh. “My wife gets more annoyed than me,” he says, with reference to the nickname. “It’s something that happened about five years ago. It’s just stuck. It’s disappointing – to actually speak about me in those terms is derogatory. I am like any goalkeeper, I make mistakes. I am a big enough boy, I can take it.

“It’s just because my nickname was always Langers, going back to Dundee,” he explains. “Someone put a C in front of it – I think it was Chris Clark, in his first spell here – and it’s just stuck. It does get a bit annoying, but I will just take it on the chin.”

If you really want to treat the inspirational Langfield to an insult then throw to him the suggestion that he is finished. He’ll catch it, then relish kicking the offending remark right back down the park again. This goalie’s got guts all right.