Dave Mackinnon reveals near death experience as former Rangers star looks to get former teammate home for Christmas

Former Rangers star Dave McKinnon has revealed for the first time how cheated death earlier this year after rupturing an artery in his brain during a horror fall.

And how he’s now helping raise funds for a stricken ex-team mate who suffered the same freak accident just weeks earlier - and ended up in a coma with permanent brain damage. McKinnon had to be rushed to hospital for lifesaving surgery after falling down a flight of stairs in Edinburgh and smashing his skull on a concrete beam.

And the horrific incident came less than two months after McKinnon’s one time Dundee team mate John MacPhail was left fighting for his life after falling down a staircase in his house. McKinnon and MacPhail were part of a Dens Park side managed by Lisbon Lion Tommy Gemmell in the late 1970s which included Jimmy Johnstone and Gordon Strachan.

Now the 66-year-old former Morton and Dundee chief executive is helping to organise a fund-raising dinner to help pay for MacPhail to be released from a hospice and return to his family home in time for Christmas. McKinnon told Record Sport : “It really has been a horrible coincidence. I didn’t appreciate how lucky I was until I spoke to the doctors at the hospital who told me exactly what happened. At one point they had 15 people trying to save my life.

“And then obviously I got word that the same thing had happened to John. My accident was in February 2022. His was in December 2021.

“I fell and hit the front of my head. John fell backwards and hit the back of his. I don’t think I would have survived if that had been me. It’s horribly ironic and it makes me think about the tragic passing of Neale Cooper, who fell to his death down a flight of stairs.

“When you’ve had a brush with your own