THE TOUGHEST OPPOSITION

Since being diagnosed with motor neurone disease in 2022, former Ipswich Town forward Marcus Stewart has vowed to keep fighting

- Ed McCambridge

Marcus Stewart can still remember the first time he suspected something about his own body wasn’t quite right. It was during the Covid pandemic and, like so many others stuck inside trying to alleviate the stresses and boredom of the time, the former Bristol Rovers, Ipswich and Sunderland forward was getting a home workout in.

“Suddenly, I just noticed my left hand wasn't gripping properly,” he explains to FFT. “I'm left-handed, so it should be my strongest one, but it just wouldn't close properly. It wasn't fatigue or anything like that - but it wasn’t responding as it should. That was the start of it all.”

Over the following months, Stewart began noticing other little peculiarities; the once reliable reflexes of a former professional footballer slowly began to falter. “I thought it was just a problem with my back at first, as I do a lot of cycling - a trapped nerve or something,” he recalls. “So I popped to the doctor, just to get a checkup. They couldn't find a cause - that’s when they began testing for something more serious.”

A year of blood tests, X-rays and MRI scans followed, before Stewart was hit with a sledgehammer of a diagnosis. “It was motor neurone disease [MND],” he remembers. “I hadn't expected it at all. In fact, I'd told my wife to stay at home as I thought I was just nipping in for an update. Twenty minutes later, I'm walking out with the news that I have a degenerative neurological disease. Words cannot describe that feeling.”