Thank you and I love you… Kieron Dyer’s words to the donor who gave him a second shot at life, writes OLIVER HOLT

It is half an hour before kick-off on Saturday afternoon and Paul Cook, the Chesterfield manager, is in the coaches’ room at the SMH Group Stadium, chatting and laughing with the Cheltenham boss, Mike Flynn, comparing bad backs, bad referees and bad team hotels.

After a few minutes, one of Chesterfield’s first team coaches, Kieron Dyer, walks in and Flynn gets up to greet him. It is almost a year to the day since Dyer’s life was saved by a liver transplant and Flynn congratulates him on the anniversary.

‘Yeah,’ Cook says, unable to resist a little quip about Dyer’s famously impenetrable demeanour, ‘Kee’s doing great. He’s even smiling once every three days and everything now.’ Dyer looks up and cracks his smile quota for the weekend.

Cook is right, too. Dyer is doing great. He has a second chance at life and is embracing it for all he is worth. And if that means valuing time with his family more than he ever did before, it also means pressing on with his ambitions for a career in coaching.

He is part of a vibrant, challenging, forward-thinking team at Chesterfield that romped away with the National League last season and is marshalled by the experience and enthusiasm and ability of Cook and bolstered by smart assistants like Danny Webb, Gary Roberts and Paddy Byrne. 

When the former England international became gravely ill at the start of last season with a chronic liver disease, primary sclerosing cholangitis (PSC), the club stuck with him and welcomed him back to work in January. Under the new majority shareholders, Phil and Ashley Kirk, Chesterfield is going places again, but is also a club run with loyalty and class.

Here’s a quick example — on Friday night, there was a party in a suite at the stadium to celebrate the 50th birthday of Zoe Edge, one of the club’s most avid fans and a cerebral palsy sufferer. Both Phil and Ashley Kirk went to the party. So did Dyer, Webb, Roberts and Byrne. 

‘I was in hospital for four months,’ Dyer says. ‘All the staff rang me nearly every day, checking how I was. They never put me under pressure that my job was unsafe. Nothing was ever done behind my back.

‘When I was in hospital, they gave me all the passwords to get the games streamed live to my laptop. Even though I was really ill, I could watch the game and text the gaffer and Robbo on their phones so they could see what I’d said at half-time in case I’d picked up something.

‘They would keep me involved on match day, even when I wasn’t there.’

There have been tears as well as smiles, though. A few months after his transplant operation, Addenbrooke’s Hospital in Cambridge forwarded a letter to him that had been sent by the family of the man who donated his liver to Dyer.

‘I sat looking at the envelope for about 45 minutes before I could open it,’ Dyer says. ‘It was a very powerful, emotional letter from the donor’s family. They said he was about my age, that he collapsed one day and within 48 hours they had to turn off the machine.

‘They said he had had a healthy life and, obviously, they were grief-stricken. They also said he was a person who would never lose an argument so I thought “well, he’s come to the right place”. I wrote my letter back straight away.

‘There’s not a day I don’t think about my donor. When people were talking about the year anniversary of having the operation, they were asking whether I was going to celebrate and have a party.

‘It is a big milestone for me because I wouldn’t be here without the donor, but I didn’t really want to celebrate or make too much of a big deal. It is a year of me continuing my life, but it is also a year since someone lost their life.

‘When I’d been back at work for a couple of months, we won the league by beating Boreham Wood here in March. I thought I wouldn’t over-celebrate it. I never won anything as a player, but this was about our players and their achievement.

‘Then the final whistle went and the fans were running on to the pitch and I just started crying on the bench. It was weird. I was embarrassed a bit. I covered my face. I had a woolly hat on and I pulled it as far down over my eyes as it would go.

‘I sat there talking to my donor under my breath for about two minutes. “This is for me and you,” I was saying. “We have just won this league. This a combination between the two of us. I wouldn’t be here without you. Thank you, I love you and appreciate everything you have done for me even though I never knew you”.’

Chesterfield have made an uneven start to life in League Two. They are a decent footballing side with clever players such as Armando Dobra, James Berry and Devan Tanton, who is on loan from Fulham, but they are a young team, too, and make a young team’s mistakes.

A defensive mix-up cost them the win against Cheltenham, but they sit 10th in League Two. The play-offs are in their sights.

Dyer’s recovery has not been without scares. There was the time, before a match at Dorking Wanderers in March, when the hospital rang to say they were worried there were signs of ‘mild rejection’ from his new liver. The news sent Dyer into a tail-spin. The doctors made a change to his medication and the fears were soon allayed.

He is getting healthier and stronger every day. He has started running and is mulling over the idea of committing to a marathon, both for his mental well-being and to raise money for a PSC charity.

He has also been asked to be an ambassador for the British Transplant Games. He went to watch the Games in Nottingham last month. His donor’s family, he says, want him to ‘shout from the rooftops about organ donation and how our son, brother and husband’s legacy is living through you’.

All that is for the future. Dyer has one of those again now.

Gunners need to grow up to lift title 

Some of the criticism aimed at referee Michael Oliver in the wake of Manchester City’s tumultuous 2-2 draw with Arsenal at the Etihad on Sunday has been pathetic. Much of it is simply a mask for the inability of managers, players and fans to take responsibility for their own team’s failings. 

The dismissal of Arsenal’s Leandro Trossard is the best example. Accuse Oliver of incompetence if you want, but the reality is that Trossard behaved like an immature idiot. 

He knew he was already on a yellow after he flattened Bernardo Silva with a hefty barge and then, after the whistle had blown, booted the ball away. It was about as obvious a second yellow as you can get. 

When Trossard finally got to the touchline after being shown the red card he deserved, he was wrapped in embraces by the Arsenal coaching staff as if he were a returning hero, when he should have been told in no uncertain terms that his rank stupidity had just cost his side the chance of a precious win. 

I have an immense amount of admiration for the job Mikel Arteta has done, but until he stops empowering indiscipline among his players, Arsenal will never win the Premier League.

Talk of modernisation seem laughable 

The chief sports writer of the Daily Telegraph, Oliver Brown, was prevented from attending the Anthony Joshua-Daniel Dubois fight at Wembley Stadium on Saturday after he wrote an article that criticised the Saudi Arabia regime that bankrolled the event and promoted it as part of the Riyadh Season. 

Apologists for the repressive kingdom’s increasing hold over British sport are many and the nauseating Sky Sports coverage of the Saudi takeover of Newcastle United Football Club set new standards for sycophancy. 

Those voices say that Saudi involvement in sport can act as a catalyst for change and modernisation in a brutal regime that has an appalling human rights record. What is true is that Saudi riches have helped to arrange marquee fights that were not possible without them and, to that extent, they have breathed new momentum and excitement into boxing. 

How the Saudis manage sporting events in Riyadh and Jeddah is up to them, but when they launch an attack on freedom of the press in this country, it makes talk of modernisation laughable. 

Sport needs competitors of character 

So Red Bull’s Max Verstappen, a racing driver who risks his life every time he gets in a car, a man who is the best at what he does in a glamorous, daredevil sport that is all about speed, danger, guts, bravery and skill, has been disciplined by the sport’s authorities because he swore in a press conference. 

Sport needs competitors of character, not drones, and the risible punishment of Verstappen makes Formula One look absurd.