Richard Keogh: ‘The next thing I know I’m waking up and speaking to paramedics’

01-Oct-2021 20:00:39 | The Guardian

Two years after being injured in a car crash the Blackpool defender opens up on the torment that followed his sacking by Derby

Richard Keogh could feel the pain but at first he did not know where it was coming from. He could hear a voice yet it made no sense. The scene was lit by blue emergency lights and the focal point was a black Range Rover, its front end crumpled around a lamp-post. Keogh began to process. His hand hurt like hell and so did his eye. Then he understood the words. “You’ve been involved in a crash,” the figure in front of him said. “You’ve been unconscious.”

It was Tuesday 24 September 2019 and for Keogh, the Derby captain at the time, it was the start of the nightmare, a fusion of physical and mental torment that would see him abandoned by his club – his contract terminated – and pushed to the brink. Depression would grip and there was a period when he came to hate the game he had always loved, when he was ready to stop the fight to recover fitness, when he considered retirement.