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New goals – opening up on football and dementia

Dave Watson was one of the toughest footballers to play the game.

And his job, says daughter Gemma, was to head the ball. A lot.

Uncompromising, whole-hearted, no-nonsense. 

With the steely stare and thick black sideburns, Dave epitomised the tall centre-back from the 70s and 80s whose primary task – aside from kicking the odd striker – was to head the ball and run through brick walls.

“That was him,” says Gemma, as she reflects on a career which came to an end when she was seven. 

“And it’s bittersweet, because he was celebrated for being hard and tough, and headers were what he did best.

“We still celebrate him for that – but at what cost?” 

Gemma Jordan, Dave’s youngest daughter, is an award-winning film maker who now lives in the US.

Her previous work includes Netflix production Girls Incarcerated and a series on former Death Row inmate Julius Jones.

Dave and his family – wife Penny and Gemma’s siblings Roger and Heather – went public four years ago after Dave, a member of Sunderland’s FA Cup winning side in 1973 and capped 65 times by England, had been diagnosed with neurodegenerative brain disease a few years earlier.