The former Spurs and Burton midfielder discusses the impact of Ugo Ehiogu’s death, swapping football for a creative career and helping players with depression
I have been playing a song about life and death on a loop today. While waiting to interview Will Miller, the former Spurs and Burton Albion footballer who wrote and sang the song just days after the death of Ugo Ehiogu, his former coach who died in April 2017 aged 44, the ghostly video of Crash Landing has been spooling out of my laptop. On a muted, sun-kissed afternoon, it offers a melancholic and beautiful soundtrack for these unsettling times.
For Miller, Ehiogu’s death felt like “a crash landing on the moon”. Three years on, trying to adjust to our new isolated reality with illness and death all around us, life continues in an eerie way. “It’s weird,” Miller says. “But sometimes you have to switch course. I remember being absolutely certain I was going to play first-team football for Tottenham. When I realised it wouldn’t happen, it was like killing an idea of myself. The person I thought I was going to be was dead. I needed to reinvent myself. I found it really difficult and it reminds me of the challenges we’re all facing right now.”
Written by Donald McRae
This news first appeared on https://www.theguardian.com/football/2020/apr/05/will-miller-ugo-ehiogu-quit-football-spurs-burton under the title “
“. Bolchha Nepal is not responsible or affiliated towards the opinion expressed in this news article.
