IN Alex Rodman’s own words, he was looking at something “life-changing” happening as he starred in Aldershot Town‘s impressive start to the 2011-12 League Two season.
The Shots had beaten West Ham en route to a Carling Cup fourth round tie at home to Manchester United and were comfortably in mid-table – three points off the play-offs – going into November.
Rodman, the talented winger who had worked his way up to the Football League via the hard-knock schools of Leamington, Grantham Town, Lincoln United, Gainsborough Trinity, Nuneaton Borough and Tamworth – and Paul Fairclough‘s England C set-up – was on the verge of something big.
By the second week in January, however, he had got that massive call. Only it came in a hospital consultation room rather than manager Dean Holdsworth’s office.
Chest pains had forced him out of the home game with Oxford United, the general consensus being that he had a virus. But a few days later, after coughing up blood the size of a 10p, he was being prescribed the blood-thinning drug Warfarin after tests showed he had three clots on his lungs.
Playing the game he loves – and merely going about his job – could kill, was Professor Sanjay Sharma’s stark warning as he diagnosed the then 24-year-old with a pulmonary embolism and ordered him to rest until at least the end of the season.
Rodman says: “I had a great four or five months when I went to Aldershot in January 2011, and we had some good success at the start of the next year, with the cup run, the game against Man United and doing OK in the league.
“I felt fine in myself but I’m all of a sudden having a doctor tell me that I can’t play for the rest of the season, and I need to take this seriously. I said ‘What do you mean, take it seriously?’
“He said, ‘Well, if you don’t follow everything you need to do with this, you could die’. I was thinking, ‘Hang on a minute, they’ve got the wrong person here’.
Inspiration
“It knocked me for six. The frustrating thing for me – and you can’t think about it too much and get depressed about it – was that from the kind of conversations I was having with the manager at the time, the standard of clubs he was telling me were interested in me was unreal.
“He was telling me he was having conversations with Sam Allardyce, when West Ham were in the Championship and we’d knocked them out of the League Cup, and Chris Hughton when he was at Birmingham.
“You think, ‘If he’s having regular conversations with them and he’s telling me they are serious conversations on a weekly basis, crikey, if I keep my head down and keep working hard, then this is something life-changing that could happen’.
“Then something life-changing does happen, but it’s completely not what you wanted. It was a real bolt from the blue.”
Understandably, after being given the all-clear to return to training at the start of pre-season with the rest of the Shots’ squad, last term was a game of catch-up fitness-wise.
By November he was on loan at York City before being made redundant by Aldershot’s administrators, along with 13 other players, in May.
Now back in the Conference having signed a deal with Grimsby Town, the 26-year-old is using some top sporting names as his inspiration.
“I know Blackburn’s former England goalkeeper Paul Robinson and Manchester City’s Scott Sinclair have recently had blood clot scares, and the tennis player Serena Williams has had one, but she came back and has won championships since,” said Rodman.
“So while there are people who might be writing me off after my problem, I need to have a good solid season, play 40-odd games and get back to where I was when I was flying before.”
Rodman had certainly risen to one of Non-League’s top prospects in two-and-a-half seasons under mentor Gary Mills at Tamworth, winning the 2008-09 Blue Square Bet North title and then establishing the Lambs in the top-flight.
Now he is aiming to help Grimsby improve on last season’s fourth place and play-off semi-final defeat to return to League Two in their fourth year outside the top 92.
As one of four stellar summer signings so far – his team-mates of last term at York, Scott Kerr and Paddy McLaughlin, being two of the others along with ex-Crawley and Luton winger Scott Neilson – joint-bosses Rob Scott and Paul Hurst appear to be assembling a squad well capable in Cleethorpes.
“From what I’ve seen so far and what I knew about it before, this isn’t a Conference club at all,” Rodman says. “It’s a bigger club than Aldershot, put it that way – the size of it and fanbase.
“It doesn’t feel like I’m dropping out of the League and coming to a Conference club, so hopefully this year we’ll get back into the League because it’s a club that belongs up there.
“My agent, Lee Philpott, is close to the managers and spoke very highly of them. I’ve only got to know them over the last few days but they both seem like really good guys, really down to earth and they’ve got the same ambitions as I’ve got – to get the club back into the League, where it belongs.
Disgusting
“I wanted to stay in the League, but that wasn’t to be and if I was to come out of it, there was only one place I was coming.
“Even at the start of the off-season when Lee told me Grimsby were interested, it stuck in my mind, because having played here for Tamworth a few years ago in a cup game, I remember thinking ‘Wow, it’s a good stadium and great fans, this does not feel like a Non-League club at all’.
“I think we’ve got the makings of a really strong squad. Hopefully we can build on what they did last year, and the people that have come in will only help the club to go that step further in getting promoted.”
And by quirk of the fixture list, who should Rodman’s scheduled Mariners debut be against on the opening day? Yes, the club he has just left and who still owe him money.
“We’ve been waiting to find out what’s going on with the club for weeks, and the way Aldershot have handled it has been disgusting,” says Rodman.
“The only time we’ve had any contact has been in the last two weeks when the administrators are trying to force through 25 per cent and then 40 per cent of the wages the lads are owed.
“The PFA – who have given us half of May and June’s money themselves – are saying they are not happy with that proposal because it basically means them mugging us off what we’re owed, but then bringing new players in on similar wages and paying them in full.
“The lads have been so badly treated, it’s sad. When you spend a couple of years somewhere, it’s a shame it ends on that note.
“But it’ll be an interesting one on the opening day, if they manage to come out of admin. I’ll probably end up getting a bit of stick off the fans, but that’s football I guess.”
That’s football – the game Rodman, after his life-changing experience, is just happy to be playing again.
Bringing new players in? Paying them in full? We’ve got 4 players on the books, but don’t let facts get in the way of your trouble stirring. And nice of you to conveniently forget about us paying you all that money while you were ill. The only people getting mugged here is the fans!