Chris Kamara opens up about his battle with speech apraxia

It’s a startling comment from Chris Kamara, the bubbly, life-and-soul character that City fans loved bouncing on the Valley Parade touchline or lighting up Soccer Saturday with his match updates.

But the hugely-popular personality, with his iconic “unbelievable Geoff” catchline, has opened up about the battle he is facing with speech apraxia.

Speaking on “The diary of a CEO with Steven Bartlett” podcast, Kamara talks frankly about the health struggles he has suffered since the start of lockdown in 2020.

The former Bantams boss, who steered them to promotion in the club’s first Wembley appearance in 1996, now faces a very different fight.

Kamara revealed how his problems with an underactive thyroid began while carrying on appearing on TV shows remotely during the early weeks of the pandemic.

“An underactive thyroid plays with your emotions,” he said. “Stuff I wouldn’t bat an eyelid at in the past because of this little butterfly thyroid in my neck now makes me more emotional.

“Going through the first lockdown when the weather was great, things were slightly different. I did loads of shows from home.

“All of a sudden, I began to not feel too well but always shrugged it off. I’d take tablets and be fine the next day but it wasn’t going away.

“I ignored it which is the worst thing you can possibly do.

“When I was broadcasting for Sky, I was trying to keep minimalistic because some of the words are coming out slurred.

“Eventually I had to see someone. I literally went 20 months before I actually got diagnosed with an underactive thyroid.”

Kamara was prescribed thyroxine to treat the condition but his voice continued to struggle. An MRI scan showed no problems with his brain but his doctor sent him to a specialist in Leeds, who straight away diagnosed the apraxia.

A therapist urged Kamara to tell people about the problem or risk viewers watching him struggle on TV and think he was drunk or suffering from a stroke.

He was reluctant to do so but was eventually invited to chat about it with close friend Ben Shephard on Good Morning Britain.

That prompted a call to put him in touch with a specialist in Sheffield who offered to help “get the jump leads going” with his speech.

In the podcast, Kamara talks at length about the treatment he now undergoes, which includes microcurrents being pumped through his body for seven hours a day.

Chris Kamara is hugely popular with football fans on Sky Sports (Image: PA)

He admits it is still hard to get his head around and he is reticent to walk into a busy room and talk to strangers - something that would never have bothered him before.

“I wouldn’t say I’m more than 60 per cent the old me, but I was 20 per cent.”

The 72-minute interview is an emotional watch, seeing someone that football fans have got to know and love as a player, manager and then, for the last two decades, a successful TV pundit, discussing this sudden and unexpectedly harsh new chapter of his life.

Kamara also tells Bartlett, an investor on TV show Dragons’ Den, about the trouble he faced growing up in a mixed-race household in Middlesbrough.

“You can’t change the course of history but life was very difficult growing up. Good days, bad days, we had terrible racism at the time.

“I was born in 1957 so in the ‘60s it wasn’t good. We were the only black family on our estate so anything happened and the police would come knocking on our door.

“He’d be involved in fist fights, that was the norm, he had to stand up and be counted. But he was always the one arrested in those situations.

“He drove it into us as kids, ‘don’t react, take it on the chin and you’ll get through it that way’.”

His father, who hailed from Sierra Leone, would occasionally gamble away his weekly wage in the bookies to leave the family struggling for food and his mum knocking on the doors of neighbours for milk and break.

At other times, she would walk the 10 miles to where his dad worked to pick up the pay packet so it wouldn’t be spent.

“Mum was the most loyal wife you could ever had. Even if they had arguments or fights, she’d vehemently stick up for him. The N-word was vibrant back in those days.

“I hear these stories now that it’s impossible to understand racism if you’re not black. It’s totally not true.

“My mum got called an ‘N-lover’ and she came through it. She knew exactly what racism was about.”