Yahoo Sport 
Meet the NHS Staff Who Formed a Football Team to Get Them Through the Covid-19 Pandemic
Football clubs have been born for many reasons. Liverpool was formed because a rent dispute with Everton meant its founder needed a team to play at Anfield. Manchester United was started by a group of railway yard workers. Athletico Redhill, meanwhile, was set up at the beginning of 2021 by a group of NHS nurses, doctors, porters and healthcare workers, all desperately trying to make it through the Covid pandemic.
Before Covid-19, Adnan Abbas, 26, and Pedro Silva, 27, were just a couple of football-mad generic therapy instructors. It’s a job that requires them to work with physiotherapists and occupational therapists to get patients with mobility issues up on their feet again and back home.
That was before Covid-19 hit.
Abbas explains how during the pandemic his day job was largely pushed to one side, and for a time his role became about helping nurses manage Covid patients. “They can't roll in bed, that becomes really difficult, and you can't expect two nurses in a bay, who're looking after six patients to do that by themselves,” he says.
Silva joined Abbas’ hospital during the second Covid peak in January 2021. He too was drafted from his day job to help with the Covid effort, which meant managing patients who had been infected with the virus.
Normally, says Silva, when someone dies in hospital there are procedures in place to make their final days as comfortable as possible. Normally, an effort is made to get people into their own room, so they can pass away peacefully, surrounded by their loved ones, but with Covid-19, there wasn’t the time or the space to do that.
“The progression of the disease was so quick,” says Silva, “you realise they’ve got Covid and then in the next couple of days they're passing away. The progression of the disease was so steep and so fast, that we didn't have enough time to get anything in place. It was tough. And with the families, a lot of them had to stay outside and watch through the window. It was difficult for sure.”
For all the talk of how Covid-19 was a disease that discriminates, attacking the old and those with ‘pre-existing conditions’, they were seeing first-hand what the virus was doing to Gen Z. ”If you see someone that's 20, 22, 23 years old and struggling with Covid,” says Silva, "we're a similar age, so we were thinking, 'Oh, my God, if we get it, is this what's going to happen to us?'”
Not that their worries were confined to the hospital. Abbas’ dad has health issues, so he would come home from shifts scared that he might be the person to infect him. “I was like, ‘dad get up in that room’, so I put him in a corner when I came home until I was showered and clean.”
Abbas and Silva needed something to release the pressure, and for them that was football.
“We just said let's use football as an escape and get the frustrations out by kicking a ball,” says Abbas. “We couldn't guarantee how many people would rock up, but all I wanted to do was go to one end of the pitch, Pedro kicks the ball at me and I'll kick the ball back.”
The training sessions Abbas and Silva put on became a lot more popular than that, and the two were soon joined by colleagues from across the hospital that included everyone from teenagers to men in their mid-40s. With the NHS’ international makeup, the team also became a place where colleagues from abroad, who didn’t have too many people around them during Covid-19, could socialise and make friends.
“A lot of these guys,” says Abbas, “they don't have any family here, and there wasn't much they could do. We had nurses all the way from Nigeria, we had people from the Philippines, and it's very difficult for them to fly back home. I think the fact that they can come and just have some fun with us, it was good.”
“It's become their escape from mundane day-to-day life. They've made friends through the football team,” adds Silva.
As a de-stressing tool, time spent on the pitch with Athletico Redhill has become invaluable. Abbas recalls how the team got him through a particularly difficult shift, where Covid-caused staff shortages had him running between two wards trying to look after patients.
“It was June, so the peak of Covid,” says Abbas. “I was texting Pedro saying, ‘Get there at 4:45, set the net up and I'm coming down’. That's when we had about eight or nine guys. I caught one of them in the corridor, and I was like ‘You're coming today.’ I think it was just too much for me. We were short staffed and it was just super stressful.
Silva also recalls how the team got him through difficult days. He remembers a particular Friday where, again, the hospital was understaffed, and even simple tasks became laborious. “The whole day I barely got anything done. I needed another member of staff, and I didn't have one, so I was just grabbing the nurse whenever I could. Obviously, the nurses are so busy they don't have time to join your session. I remember that particular day, as soon as I finished, I got home and I said to my girlfriend 'You have no idea how much I want tomorrow to come.'”
“He missed an open goal that weekend as well,” adds Abbas.
As Abbas says, although it was “the difficult days that made us really start the team”, it will outlast the pandemic. The team recently finished as runners up in the Mid Sussex Football League and are still aiming to finish their inaugural season with a cup win. But whatever Athletico Redhill goes on to achieve, it’ll always be around to make the lives of NHS staff at least little easier.
“There are days,” says Silva, “where you just get to the end of the week and you think thank God it's Saturday tomorrow, we've got a game.”
Athletico Redhill were named the winners of the Panasonic Style Sponsorship. The competition was open to grassroots football teams with the winner provided with £2,000 prize, new kits and a makeover from HD Cutz to ensure they play with style both on and off the pitch.
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