walked out with the England and Wales team<\/a> before their “Alzheimer’s Society International” friendly.<\/p>\nAdron’s son Darren said the reality of dementia was that his father “forgot the Wembley experience pretty much straight away” and this frustrates and scares him.<\/p>\n
But his family have said they will never forget “seeing his face watching the match” and how much it meant to him. <\/p>\n
Adron, who is a lifelong Bristol City fan, began playing league football in his youth.<\/p>\n
He was also in the crowd at Wembley in 1966 to witness England winning the World Cup – what he says is his most memorable event and still has the ticket stubs from that game.<\/p>\n
Earlier this year, Adron received a video message from World Cup winner Sir Geoff Hurst, inviting him back to Wembley to be a mascot. <\/p>\n
After being shown photographs of him walking out with the players, Darren said his father had asked, “did it really happen?”.<\/p>\n
“It’s emotional, but unfortunately that is one of the main effects of dementia,” Darren said.<\/p>\n
It is the fourth game of its kind, known as the Alzheimer’s Society International, since the Football Association established a partnership with the charity in 2021.<\/p>\n
Over the past four years, the partnership has raised more than \u00a31.2m for the Alzheimer’s Society.<\/p>\n
There are more than 101,500 people living with dementia in south-west England, including about 4,600 people in Bristol.<\/p>\n
Matt Hughes-Short, of the Alzheimer’s Society<\/a>, said the partnership with the Football Association had had “such a tangible impact for people with dementia and thousands of fans, players and staff now know where to go to access vital support”. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A football fan with dementia who led out the England men’s team at Wembley last week feels frustrated…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":217037,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[563],"tags":[64,63,596,85],"class_list":["post-217036","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-football","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-football","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/217036","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=217036"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/217036\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/217037"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=217036"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=217036"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=217036"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}