Marcus Stewart on living with MND: ‘You ask yourself, why me? But I have to make the most of it’

M arcus Stewart hops off his electric scooter and a couple of minutes later, in the corner of a restaurant a few miles outside Bristol, he is talking about how his workout routine has changed. Stewart, whose left foot fired Ipswich into Europe, has lost grip in his left hand since being diagnosed with motor neurone disease last year. “I went on the bike this morning, but only indoors; I was on Zwift. I don’t have to brake, so it’s pretty good,” he says, smiling.

Stewart, who grew up in south Bristol, made his name across town at Rovers before fruitful spells at Huddersfield, Ipswich and Sunderland. He will return to the Memorial Stadium, where he also coached, for a charity match on Saturday to raise funds for the Darby Rimmer Foundation, which was set up after the former Liverpool and Bradford defender Stephen Darby was diagnosed with MND in 2018. So far Stewart and his wife, Louise, family, friends and countless supporters have raised more than £160,000 in the fight against the degenerative condition.

There were a couple of episodes that prompted Stewart to visit his doctor, who arranged nerve tests. There was the time his left hand “went all crampy” when trying to pick up a pint, the day he had to stop doing pull-ups because he kept losing his grip and the moment while relaxing at home that he noticed his left hand and arm looking noticeably skinny.

Stewart saw a chiropractor thinking they would nip any issues in the bud but two or three months down the line nothing changed. “I was thinking maybe it’s a neck problem or a back problem … it [MND] wasn’t even on my radar. But I think it was on my wife’s because she Googles things. She’s Dr Lou,” he says with a smile.

Then came an appointment with a neurologist. Stewart