Taken from The Athletic, who I wouldn't usually lift articles from but I think everyone wants to know how Sol's doing
Tuesday just gone was Sol Bamba’s last hit of chemotherapy. When he started the first of six sessions a few months earlier, he was counting the days to his final visit to University Hospital Llandough but as the time came to say goodbye, he found it hard to leave.
The nurses there had laid their hands on a batch of the T-shirts worn by the defender’s Cardiff City team-mates in support of him, with Bamba’s name and squad No 22 on the back and a message of “We Fight With You” (below). There was laughter, there were tears and he promised to visit again soon. He had never wanted to step through the door but there it was, struggling to tear himself away.
“It sounds daft but really it’s not,” Bamba says. “You have this thing where, to begin with, you’re only there because you’ve got cancer. You’d rather be anywhere else. But the relationships become personal and when you leave for the last time — yes, you’re happy because the treatment has gone well but you’re a bit sad too. You’ve got affection for the people and the place, because of what they’ve done for you. I said to them, ‘Don’t you worry, I’ll be back’. And I will.”
Bamba plans to make a donation to the hospital in Penarth and keep in touch with as many of the staff as he can.
They have steered him through the most difficult period of his life, from the moment — on Christmas Eve — when the results of a biopsy showed he had non-Hodgkin lymphoma, a rare form of cancer. Its survival rate is relatively high, so much so that the doctors told him of all the variations to be diagnosed with, this was as beatable as most. But it still threatened to change everything.
“They sent me home for Christmas Day with my head spinning a bit,” Bamba says. “Knowing the chances of recovering from it were high, that was a good thing, but first of all you’re waiting for it to sink in. ‘Cancer? I’m a footballer, a healthy guy’. I was shocked. But straight away I wanted to know when we were starting. ‘How do I fight this and how do I get better? When’s my next game?’”
The phone call to tell him about his diagnosis came from Len Nokes, Championship Cardiff’s club doctor. He wanted to speak to Bamba in person. Bamba could tell from the tone of his voice that something was wrong and asked him to be honest.
It was not the first time Nokes had dealt with a situation like this. A decade earlier, it was at his insistence that Stephen McPhail, then a midfielder for the Welsh club, went for a specialist examination of a lump on his chin. McPhail, like Bamba, was suffering from a form of lymphoma but caught it early enough to make a full recovery.
Speaking on a video call from his kitchen, Bamba looks fit and healthy. He has family in France, including two daughters, but Zoom has allowed them to keep a close eye on his condition at a time when travel is restricted. “My mum’s a teacher. She comes over whenever she’s on holiday,” Bamba says. “With COVID, she hasn’t been able to do that but she calls me every day and because she can actually see me, she knows how I’m looking and if things are going well.”
Bamba has a scan in three weeks’ time to check that the cancer has gone completely, but the doctors are extremely confident about his condition. At one point there was a suggestion he might be able to end his chemotherapy after the third session but Bamba stuck with having all six to “make sure it doesn’t come back. Getting rid of what was there was only part of it. I had to do it properly”.
The trick to understanding Bamba’s frame of mind is to look for the widest smile in the game.
He is a picture of happiness now — albeit slightly tired after Tuesday’s chemotherapy — but when the side effects of the first round struck him, he hid himself away; in part because the fatigue and nausea made it impossible for him to do much more than get out of bed to go to the toilet, but also because he wanted to stop anyone seeing him “weak”.
“You know me, I’m a happy guy,” Bamba says. “I try to think of myself as strong too. But the first chemo left me so tired. I could have stayed in bed for three days, honestly. That’s not like me at all. I lost my appetite and I lost a lot of weight. I didn’t have the energy to go downstairs and I didn’t want to. I went to the bathroom and that was about it.
“Nobody wants to see a miserable Sol. It’s just not me. I stayed by myself and I shut myself away, but only because I knew the side effects would pass before long. You’re basically being poisoned, but for good reasons — if that makes sense. That’s how I felt, in both ways.”
As so often happens, the symptoms of Bamba’s cancer were innocuous; painful at times but not easy to equate to serious illness. He had pain on the left side of his back and at night it could be so severe it kept him awake. But Cardiff were in the middle of a busy season and Bamba had reached veteran status at 35 years old. He agreed with Cardiff’s manager at the time, Neil Harris, that he would play through it and have his back looked at when a break in the fixture list arrived.
“I didn’t think much of it,” he says. “It was uncomfortable, don’t get me wrong, and at night the sharp pain was starting to make me think, ‘This really isn’t right’. But I was a defender in the Championship who was getting battered in every game. I’m not a young player either, so you think your body is suffering a bit. That’s all.
“I had MRI scans and there was nothing there but the doctor wanted me to see a specialist because he couldn’t explain the pain. Something about it was worrying him. They did a biopsy and they found what they found.”
Cardiff announced the diagnosis in early January, two days before Bamba’s 36th birthday. He was admitted to hospital that week.
“Christmas and birthdays, it all went out the window,” he says. “I’m not going to remember them for great reasons.” But overnight, messages began pouring in. Bamba was a popular footballer, blessed with a huge personality, and his career had taken him from Paris Saint-Germain to Edinburgh’s Hibernian, Leeds, Palermo in Sicily and Cardiff, with other stops in Turkey and Scotland between, and also brought 46 Ivory Coast caps.
That support was a shot in the arm. The diagnosis made Bamba feel isolated; determined, but isolated all the same. The well-wishes made him keener than ever to get started with his treatment.
“You’d probably underestimate how much it means,” Bamba says. “Just a simple message or someone saying good luck to you, it gave me strength. It makes you want to beat it and beat it quickly. It was overwhelming because when you get the news, you feel a bit alone. You’ve got your family there but they’re going to suffer too. It’s horrible for them, really worrying. Then all this support comes and you’re blown away. I was shocked that so many people cared.”
Bamba, Cardiff
Cardiff’s players show their support as Bamba had his cancer treatment
Telling his family was particularly difficult because they were spread between Wales and France. Bamba lives near Cardiff with wife Chloe and his teenage stepson. His former partner and their two girls, aged 14 and nine, are in Paris. His parents and his brother and sister are also in France, where Bamba was born and grew up. COVID-19 restrictions meant all of those abroad were unable to fly over to see him.
“It was as hard as you’d expect,” he says. “From day one I told everyone, ‘If you can be positive for me, I’ll be fine. Honestly, I will’. It’s not an easy thing to ask but if they were miserable, I knew I’d find it harder. If I saw them sad or feeling weak, the mental impact would be bigger on me.
“But my daughters, they’re only kids. You say the word ‘cancer’ and the first question that goes through their head is, ‘Are you going to die?’ People still feel like that, even though there’s amazing treatment these days. That’s what they asked: ‘Dad, are you going to die?’
“It was the only time I asked myself the same question. To begin with, my only thought was, ‘Sol, it’s fine, you’ve got this’ but them saying that, it was common sense. It hits you. I had to say it was a possibility — not likely, but a possibility — because I couldn’t lie to them. What if something went wrong? But in my head, I was telling myself I’d be fine.”
Harris was a good person for Bamba to lean on, even though he was sacked by Cardiff less than a fortnight after Bamba began chemotherapy. Former striker Harris had been diagnosed with testicular cancer in 2001, when he was a 23-year-old with Millwall, and overcame it. They stayed in touch after his dismissal and Harris’ wife spoke to Chloe to “help her understand the other side, about coping as the person who’s trying to offer support”. Bamba went through the NHS for treatment and left his final chemotherapy session with deep gratitude to the service.
“You’d assume that being a footballer, you’d have the money and want to go private,” Bamba says, “but that wasn’t the case. I went with the NHS and I can’t speak about any of this without saying how good the NHS and the staff in it were. It’s important for people like me to say that. I want to try and do something special for them if I can.”
In the midst of it all was his playing career.
Bamba thought first about his health but very quickly his mind turned to the implications for him professionally. He was not ready to retire and did not want to be forced into that decision but, now 36, everything depended on how his body responded to the treatment. He began working on his coaching badges through the Football Association of Wales (FAW) but they were a fall back; insurance in the event that returning as a player was beyond him.
“I had two thoughts,” he says. “The first was that I was going to get better and the second was that if I wanted to play again, I had to try and stay in great shape. I’m a stubborn guy and I think the doctors realised that. They’d never had a case like me — a professional footballer — so they tried to understand my thinking.
“Some things I had to do, no arguing from me. But at the same time, I’m an athlete so if I wanted to get on the treadmill or do some exercise — well, they accepted I was going to push myself a bit. I think they thought, ‘We’re going to have to tolerate this guy breaking a few rules!’”
When Bamba returned to training with Cardiff this month, he did so ahead of schedule. “Again, the doctors accepted there was stuff I had to do. It was good for my mental health as much as anything.”
Sol Bamba, Cardiff City
Bamba in action last season (Photo: Stu Forster/Getty Images)
But did retirement cross his mind? “The thing is, you’ve got no idea how the cancer will impact your body,” he says. “You know what the effect of the chemo might be but that’s not the same as knowing if it’ll take a toll when you get back on the training pitch. And if it does take a toll, what can you do? Maybe nothing. What I’m saying, though, is that if I’d had to give it up then it wouldn’t have been my decision. It would have been someone else saying to me ‘Sol, you can’t do this any more.’ I can’t lie, that was a hard thought to deal with.”
Bamba’s first training session after his diagnosis, on April 8, was short. Half an hour. It was also the happiest half-hour of his life.
He went through a few routines before leaving Cardiff’s squad to complete some more concerted work for their game against Blackburn on April 10, but the smell of the grass and the lick of the wind was euphoric. There was emotion at first and then a swift return to dressing-room jokes. The other players asked if he had been on holiday.
“I came away thinking that football had never made me so happy and all I’d done was run around a bit,” Bamba says. “I’ve had a 20-year career and I never thought a training session would mean so much to me.
“All of us in football, we take things for granted. You train, you play games; you finish one season, you start another. It’s an amazing career and I’ve loved it but maybe I forget. Maybe I don’t think about (appreciating it) enough. It was the best thing ever to go back into the changing room and say, ‘I’m buzzing, I’m happy to be here. Let’s do it’.”
People know he is taking this seriously, Bamba jokes, because he has decided to go vegan. He did some reading about cancer and some of the research suggested that tweaks to his diet might reduce the chances of the lymphoma returning. “Everyone’s been going vegan for a few years,” he says. “I’m a bit slow to it but I’m giving it a go and I feel better for it already. And I say that as someone who loves a steak, believe me. That’s a big sacrifice! But it needs to be done.”
In an ideal world, he would love to play again before the end of this season.
His most recent appearance was on December 16, as a late substitute in a 3-2 home win over Birmingham (and eight days before his diagnosis). But he is only into his third week of training and Cardiff are two games from finishing their campaign.
If an appearance comes against Birmingham or Rotherham, it comes and although Bamba’s contract ends this summer, he says he expects to play on for another year; to take another 12 months and then evaluate his options from there. He has one promotion with Cardiff three years ago and played 28 times in the Premier League for them. He would like a proper bookend to his career.
“I’ll do another year,” Bamba says. “That’s definitely the plan.
“After that, who knows? But I can’t finish like this. I don’t want to finish like this. It would be the worst way. I’m going to work my way back in and when the time’s right, I’ll finish properly. Because this isn’t it.”
