Alex Fletcher: ‘I felt like if I passed out that could have been it really’

I t was, Alex Fletcher says, just an ordinary matchday but one that soon spiralled into the extraordinary and almost culminated in tragedy. There were the usual routines and rituals: the two-hour car journey from Exeter to Twerton Park with a few of his Bath City teammates, his double step and jump before the pre-match handshakes. He was on a high after scoring the winning goal at Tonbridge Angels in the National League South three days earlier, feeling on top of his game with the club pushing for the sixth‑tier playoffs. But five minutes into November’s match against Dulwich Hamlet, after haring on to a pass and attempting to cross the ball first time, Fletcher received a nudge and went thudding into advertising hoardings reinforced with concrete blocks.

His head pounded and there was a deafening ringing sound in his ears. Paramedics on the scene treated him for concussion, potential spine complications and kept him still. The concern on the face of his manager, Jerry Gill, the Bath chairman, Nick Blofeld, and the teammates drifting in and out of his eyeline told him everything. “Then I heard the stadium announcer say the game was abandoned,” Fletcher says. “At that point I knew it had to be serious. I actually remember feeling a bit of guilt, thinking: ‘Oh no, Dulwich have come all the way from London.’ I know what it is like, a massive pain to have to make that journey again, especially on a Tuesday night.”

Forty-five minutes later he was in a neck-brace in the back of an ambulance, his mother, Alison, in the front, and heading for emergency neurosurgery at Southmead hospital in Bristol. Fletcher vomited over a paramedic en route. His father, Paul, was following in a car. “I felt like if I fell asleep or passed out,