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Author Topic: The Ex Swindon Town Player Where Are They Now Thread  (Read 4294167 times)
Bedford Red

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Smithers Jones




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« Reply #11835 on: Thursday, March 12, 2020, 21:38:46 »

Callum Kennedy has recently left Billericay Town to sign for Dorking Wanderers
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Ginginho

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« Reply #11836 on: Thursday, March 12, 2020, 22:06:14 »

Jack Stephens pranked by Shane Long and Nathan Redmond Smiley

https://www.facebook.com/southamptonfc/videos/497408127832765/
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tans
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« Reply #11837 on: Friday, March 13, 2020, 10:53:39 »

Adam Rooney signing for Solihull Moors.

Not sure why mind
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Leggett
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« Reply #11838 on: Friday, March 13, 2020, 11:18:59 »

Wheelbarrows full of money?
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tans
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« Reply #11839 on: Friday, March 13, 2020, 11:19:28 »

Their season will be suspended too i should think
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horlock07

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« Reply #11840 on: Friday, March 20, 2020, 18:30:22 »

Charlie Austin has coronavirus.
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tans
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« Reply #11841 on: Friday, March 20, 2020, 20:13:50 »

Charlie Austin has coronavirus.

West Brom say he didnt, had the symptoms but wasnt tested
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Flashheart

« Reply #11842 on: Friday, March 20, 2020, 21:01:46 »

Looks like the headline writer got a bit excited.

He's showing symptoms but has not been tested - the man himself says so.
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THE FLASH

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« Reply #11843 on: Saturday, March 21, 2020, 02:16:00 »

Looks like the headline writer got a bit excited.

He's showing symptoms but has not been tested - the man himself says so.

Runny nose by not the sniffles!
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Clems Army!
JBZ
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« Reply #11844 on: Saturday, March 21, 2020, 20:03:19 »

Listened to a 90s football podcast this afternoon featuring John Moncur. Favourite favourite player after Nijholt.
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donkey
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He headed a football.




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« Reply #11845 on: Saturday, March 21, 2020, 20:05:07 »

Listened to a 90s football podcast this afternoon featuring John Moncur. Favourite favourite player after Nijholt.

John Moncur had earned this corner with his skill.
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donkey tells the truth

I headed the ball.

eeeeeeeeeeeeeee-aaaaaaaawwwwwww
JBZ
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« Reply #11846 on: Saturday, March 21, 2020, 20:10:03 »

Also listened to Kamara on Lovejoy's podcast.
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tans
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« Reply #11847 on: Saturday, March 21, 2020, 20:10:58 »

Listened to a 90s football podcast this afternoon featuring John Moncur. Favourite favourite player after Nijholt.

Was that the quickly kevin one?
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JBZ
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« Reply #11848 on: Saturday, March 21, 2020, 20:11:50 »

Aye
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tans
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« Reply #11849 on: Sunday, March 22, 2020, 18:44:53 »

Good interview on The Athletic with Dean Hooper and journo (Ex-STFC) Stuart James. Copied for those who are interested and dont subscribe.

Quote
“I don’t know whether I was actually insane or whether it was the drug, or whether it was a combination of everything that was going on and I just shut down. But they didn’t know I was tripping, they didn’t know I’d taken LSD at the time.”

Dean Hooper is speaking in a small coffee shop in Harefield, on the western outskirts of London, on a Friday afternoon. We’ve not met up for 25 years, ever since we shared a dressing room as players at Swindon Town. By the time we finish talking, in a pub across the road about three hours later, I walk away thinking I knew never him in the first place.

Now aged 48, Hooper has an extraordinary life story that he is “unlocking” step by step and telling for the benefit of others. As a footballer, he was a journeyman who represented a long list of non-League clubs either side of signing for Swindon and playing more than 100 games for Peterborough United. As a person, it is hard to know where to start.

Hooper was left feeling as though “someone had cut my legs off” after he was sexually abused at the age of 15. Within two years, he was a regular drug user. By the time he turned 19, he was detained in a secure unit at Ealing Hospital after being sectioned under the Mental Health Act.

Shortly after signing for Peterborough in 1998, Hooper was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, and five years ago he walked out of his house with the intention of taking his own life. A chance meeting with a homeless man saved him.

Probably the most important thing to say after all of that is that Hooper is smiling now, in an extremely positive frame of mind about the future and probably more comfortable in his own skin than ever before. “I think I’m in the best place I’ve ever been,” he says, “and that’s why I feel comfortable talking about everything now.”

Luciano Pavarotti. Nessun Dorma.

Hooper was a patient at Ealing Hospital’s psychiatric unit during Italia 90. He watched David Platt’s volley, Paul Gascoigne’s tears and England’s World Cup semi-final heartache surrounded by anyone and everyone, from heroin addicts to murderers, and whenever he hears that Pavarotti song it takes him back there in an instant.

“I can’t remember this but one of my mates said that he came in and watched one of the games with me,” Hooper says. “The trouble is, with trauma, you block out so much. I’ve been through quite high levels of psychology and that’s deep in itself. But I still think there’s so much that I’ve locked up, just for my own protection. But that World Cup, that music is the most powerful thing for me. If I hear that, it does tingle.”

His life had started to unravel a few years earlier, partly through drug use. The rave scene was in full flow in the late Eighties but Hooper didn’t need to be dancing in a field, somewhere off the M25, to be popping pills. “I was smoking dope a lot. Predominantly socially, but I’d have drugs on me most days,” he says. “Not heavy, but certainly marijuana — I smoked ridiculous amounts of it in that sort of period, at about 17.

“It got a little bit harder — ecstasy and LSD. I’d take it casually. I’d just pop a pill. I was trying to cover up that trauma from what happened when I was a kid, I suppose. Is that an excuse? I don’t honestly know. Sometimes I think… I think I was lost.”

The trauma Hooper is referring to involved a youth worker who sexually abused him and, understandably, it is still an extremely difficult subject for him to talk about now. “It was a one-off occasion, where he drugged me and whatever else, it was bad. I didn’t know. The curtains were drawn, a glimmer of light… I can see it now. Not good, mate. And I just felt weak.

“I suppose that’s why I was so aggressive throughout my life. To be honest, that’s what it is really. I’m not that person. I was happy-go-lucky, talk to anybody, smile on my face all the time. Then the shutters came down and that’s it.”

Asked whether he reported the incident at the time, Hooper replies: “No. Never have. I wanted to go back and kill him, had all those thoughts. One of my mates put a baseball bat in my hand and said, ‘Let’s go. Let’s do it.’ I don’t honestly know why I didn’t report it. But he’s dead now.”

Does he think he would have ended up in Ealing Hospital had he not been sexually abused? “That’s a fucking good question. And I admire the thought method involved in that,” Hooper says. “It’s really, really hard to answer because, what with the broken heart as well, the two happened so quickly.”

Hooper was in love with a 22-year-old model at the age of 17. She was a neighbour and fell pregnant with his child, which she ended up losing. Hooper wasn’t ready to be a father but wasn’t prepared for life without his girlfriend either. When she left him, he was devastated. “With the two going on (the sexual abuse before) it just threw me. A man with a broken heart… the toughest, strongest person in the world can’t handle that. I’ve seen that.”

After being expelled from a bricklaying course at college following an incident with a spirit level — Hooper says the teacher hit him first — he joined non-League Hendon’s youth team. Hooper enjoyed played football — he trained with Watford when he was younger — but liked going out even more and admits there was a two-year period when he was “heavy on the drugs”.

Hooper shrugs. “The rave scene was happening then, everybody was doing it. I just wanted to dance and listen to the music. There was a group called Spiral Tribe. I remember on New Year’s Eve we went to a place called the Roundhouse, in Camden, which was derelict then, set fire to crates in the middle of it to keep warm, had a generator going, and got kicked out at about four in the morning. Mad times… but good times as well.”

Hooper’s behaviour had started to become more and more irrational. The drugs were taking their toll and he was suffering from paranoia but there were wider concerns about his mental health too. Everything was spiralling out of control, so much so that his mum and dad picked up the phone one day and decided to act. Little did they know that their son was high on LSD at the time.

“Three doctors turned up,” Hooper says. “They were like three wise men — and at the time I was thinking exactly that. I was thinking, ‘I’m Godly in some way’, because I was tripping off my head. It was quite frightening. I thought they’d come to see the son of God almost. Heavy stuff. When you get that mindset, that you actually believe it as well… that’s what I think a lot of people with bipolar will talk about, you go to that high of self-confidence, spiritually as well.

“I haven’t spoken to my sisters about that day, both of them were there at that time. But I can remember the three doctors and I can remember I was ushered out of the door, into an ambulance. Two male nurses came to take me into Ealing mental hospital, which is now luxury flats. I didn’t really know what was going on.

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