Former Wakefield and Warrington star reveals suspected CTE diagnosis after Nick Fozzard chat

Former Wakefield Trinity and Warrington Wolves half-back Nathan Wood has revealed that he has been diagnosed with a ‘pretty CTE (chronic traumatic encephalopathy) diagnosis’.

Wood made over 100 appearances in Super League at the latter end of his career, the majority of them for the Wolves after originally spending a solitary season in England with Wakefield in 2002. He infamously scored the first try at the new Halliwell Jones Stadium for Warrington.

The 53-year-old told SEN Radio about how repeated concussions throughout had left him suffering symptoms similar to that of CTE – and a conversation with his former team-mate at Warrington, Nick Fozzard, urged him to go and get tested.

CTE can only definitively be diagnosed after death but it is possible to be diagnosed with suspected CTE, a situation Wood now finds himself in.

Wood said: “I said to him, ‘What are the symptoms?’ and he told me, and I go, ‘Mate, I’ve had that for ages’.“And he told me that I should get tested, and I was like, ‘I don’t want to know’, and he was like, ‘you’ve got to know’.”

Wood revealed he had undergone 133 scans, with 108 of them returning abnormal findings to suggest a diagnosis of CTE.

He also admitted that throughout his 15-year playing career, he estimated he had been knocked unconscious around two times per season.

He added: “The chances of coming through that unscathed are pretty much zero. I knew there were things going on with me that weren’t normal, but I just kept it dark, as you do.”

That included a horrific incident at the start of his career when playing under-21s rugby when Wood was knocked out and then going home, waking up and discovering he had temporarily lost his eyesight.

He recalled: “I was in intensive care for two days, completely blind, and then I had to take a year off footy.”

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