How CPR and two everyday heroes saved a 13-year-old boy's life - and why Shropshire FA is supporting lifesaving training
As Christmas approaches once more, one family from Shifnal will be eternally grateful to the grassroots football community and two CPR-trained spectators who saved their son.
On a wet, grey Sunday in Shropshire, one of those ordinary grassroots match days filled with steaming flasks, shouts from touchlines and muddy boots, 13-year-old Jake, a pupil at Idsall School in Shifnal and a player for PSG, completed his warm-up as he had done hundreds of times before. There was nothing to suggest the trauma about to unfold.
Less than 10 minutes into just the third game of the season, Jake jogged towards the sideline, glanced over to his mother Liz, a midwife, and said: “I don’t feel right.”
He collapsed instantly.
PSG coach that day, Chris Ramsey, now a county referee, ran to where Jake lay on the grass: “You know instantly when something is very wrong. I’ve benefited from CPR and basic life-saving skills training thanks to Shropshire FA. I could see Jake wasn’t responding at all. That’s when I shouted for help,” Chris said.
“I heard someone shout “child unresponsive,” and then I saw it was my son,” Liz recalled. Liz sprinted onto the pitch, her ears and eyes telling her what no parent ever wants to believe.
“Jake wasn’t breathing properly. He was grey. It was every mother’s worst nightmare,” she said.
What happened next is the reason Jake, now 16, preparing for his GCSEs and hoping for a career in engineering, is still alive.
The lifesavers who just happened to be there
In a twist of fate that would later be described as “the planets aligning,” two CPR-trained bystanders were watching football that morning. Paul Homer, a firefighter with West Midlands Fire Service at Fallings Park in Wolverhampton, was there as coach and to watch his son Lucas, one of Jake’s teammates. Paul had been on weekend shifts for the first two games of the season; this was his first chance to watch the team play.
“When I got to him, Jake was grey. His breathing was all over the place,” Paul recalled. “At first I thought he might be fitting, but then I realised this was cardiac arrest.”
Paul didn’t hesitate. He began mouth-to-mouth resuscitation; at the same moment, across the field, a nurse was already running.
Nicola Matthews, a palliative care nurse across Whitchurch and club secretary for Nova United, had been watching another game. “I heard the shout and just ran. You don’t think, you just go,” Nicola said. “Jake needed chest compressions immediately. Paul and I fell straight into a rhythm. Training took over and we worked as a team.”
As Nicola performed chest compressions and Paul kept oxygen circulating, parents and spectators formed a protective circle around Jake as his distraught teammates looked on.
“Over 20 years as a firefighter, I’ve seen a lot,” Paul said. “But this… this stays with you. I was 12 feet away when he collapsed. Usually, we’re minutes away when called out, and sometimes that’s too late. Time is everything.”
Chris Ramsey, an IT consultant by day, said: “I tried to keep Jake warm by rubbing his body, but Paul and Nicola were legends that day.”
When the road ambulance arrived, followed minutes later by the air ambulance, Jake’s heart was shocked with a defibrillator and he was stabilised. Sedated and airlifted to the Royal Stoke University Hospital, he was placed in an induced coma for 36 hours. He woke, confused but alive.
Two days later, he was moved to Birmingham Children’s Hospital under the care of Dr Bole. No clear cause was found, but electrical instability in the heart was suspected. An ICD (implantable cardioverter defibrillator) was fitted. Jake was discharged on his 14th birthday some days later.
A long road back
The two years that followed brought continual monitoring, medication, including beta blockers, and some time away from school.
“Idsall School supported him throughout,” Liz said. Jake eventually returned to school six weeks after the incident. Although he tried to come back to football, the anxiety was understandably overwhelming. In December 2024, after playing since he was five years old, he made the difficult decision to step away from the sport.
Liz said, “Since the surgery he’s been so much better. He’s focused on his future now; he’s keeping fit and continues to run - his GCSEs come next. “Jake is looking at a career in engineering after that. We’re just grateful he’s here to have a future.”
Why CPR training matters: 'Everyone should know this'
The emotional impact of that day stayed buried for firefighter Paul until much later. “It didn’t really hit me until about 18 months later.
“I was sat at a friend’s funeral, that’s when the weight of what happened with Jake came back.”
Despite his heroism, Paul has remained humble: “I was just a small cog in a big wheel. Nicola and I were in the right place at the right time. Our training kicked in and thank God it did.”
“CPR training should be mandatory in grassroots football, and honestly, in every sport and in every school. Everyone should know what to do. It saves lives. Jake is living proof.”
Nicola, who wasn’t due to be there that day but who found herself watching her younger son play on another pitch just yards away from Jake, agreed: “People think emergencies happen somewhere else. They don’t. They happen at kids’ football matches on grey Sunday mornings. If more people know CPR, more children and adults will survive.”
Why Shropshire FA is supporting the British Heart Foundation
“From the moment Jake collapsed to the moment the ambulance arrived, it was the actions of trained people that kept him alive,” Coach Chris Ramsey said.
“As coaches and volunteers, we’re responsible for dozens of young people every week. The Shropshire FA’s support of the British Heart Foundation is about making CPR knowledge universal, not optional.”
He added, “If one more life is saved because people heard Jake’s story and decided to get trained, then something powerful has come out of that terrible day.”
Jake’s story is a reminder
A reminder that heroes don’t always wear uniforms, though in this case, both often do.
A reminder that CPR training transforms bystanders into lifesavers.
And a reminder that an ordinary Sunday match day can become the moment everything changes.
But above all, it’s a reminder that a 13-year-old boy from Shifnal lived, because two trained people ran across a football pitch without hesitation.
Jake is now 16, revising for his GCSEs, dreaming of his future.
And that future exists because CPR works.
To read Jake's story in the Shropshire FA Christmas digital magazine, see here, or to support Shropshire FA with their British Heart Foundation fundraising efforts, see here.
