By Chris Wright
The man you see before you is one George Dowell, a young lad who sadly saw his dreams of playing professional football ended prematurely when a car crash left him paralysed from the chest down.
Dowell was playing for Worthing FC at the time of the crash in 2010, harbouring aspirations of making it up out of the Isthmian League Division One South and into the Conference South.
As you might imagine, the broken spine he suffered forced him to call time on his playing days, though the 22-year-old has refused to give up on his dreams of promotion.
Indeed, the former Worthing defender has now used the money he received in compensation after his accident to buy the cash-strapped club outright!
“Nothing beats playing, ask any retired player,” Dowell told BBC South Today.
“You have to find the next best thing and the next best thing is being a coach or an owner.”
Dowell first joined the club as a 16-year-old in 2008 and had only made a handful of appearances for the first team before his accident.
“A couple of days after my final appearance on the bench for the first team I was involved in a road traffic accident and broke my spine and was paralysed from the chest down and that was the end of that,” he explained.
“I don’t remember too much of the car crash, I’ve been told the car flipped and I ended up in a field.”
After being rushed to Chichester hospital’s Intensive Trauma Unit for emergency surgery, Dowell then spent almost a full year in rehab at the Salisbury spinal unit.
Shortly thereafter, he decided to start a new club to help ease his football withdrawal symptoms, Worthing Borough, which he ran for a few months before reading in a local paper that his old side were going through a rough patch vis-a-vis their finances.
“It took me a while to get back involved in football,” he added.
“I saw in the paper Worthing FC were in financial trouble. I still knew a couple of people at the club, came to see the people in charge so I thought I could help, I took a punt and here we are.”
Dowell has already put his compo money to good use at Worthing, installing a brand new all-weather 3G pitch at Worthing’s Woodside Road home ground as well as submitting plans to redevelop the stadium – adding that he’s willing to spend “hundreds of thousands of pounds” in his bid to get The Rebels promoted.
He’s also planning to let local players use the new pitch when Worthing aren’t playing on it, thus providing benefits not only for his team but for the entire community.
“I love football but it’s also a business decision. It will hopefully filter from younger players to the Worthing team and attract new players.
The five-year plan is we want to be in Conference South.”
For what little it’s worth, we here at Pies wish him all the luck in the world.
What a top gent.