Gary Lineker has opened up on the struggles he faced when his son George battled against leukaemia

George Lineker was just eight weeks old when he was diagnosed with leukaemia, and there were grave fears for his life.

Lineker wanted it to be him that had leukaemia, and not his son

Former Barcelona star Gary Lineker has opened up on the struggles he faced when his son George battled against leukaemia. George Lineker was just eight weeks old when he was diagnosed with leukaemia, and there were grave fears for his life. “I wanted it to be me that had it,” Lineker told The Athletic’s The Moment podcast. “I didn’t want it to be my little kid and I used to have this recurring dream of carrying a tiny little white coffin. It’s horrible. It woke me up so many times.” The scare came to be diagnosed as leukaemia after Linker, and his partner noticed a small mark on George’s head, with the baby then just a few weeks old.

“It was like a little spot or bumped on his forehead,” Lineker said. “They thought they would take a tiny biopsy just in case. Then they said we’d have another check-in in just under two weeks’ time.

Gary never forgets his son’s first night

“In the interim, he had more of these spots appear all over his head, so he looked like a golf ball. We went back for the check, and they said it was this skin condition. But in the days before that, he started to get very unwell. He was groaning and had these little swellings over his body. They took a look, and I’ll never, ever forget it and they took his nappy off, and they just looked at each other and went, ‘Oh, I’m really sorry to tell you, this is something far more serious’. They said they needed to do more tests but that it looked like leukaemia. It was difficult because we were being told that it would be tough for him to make it through the night.”

“It was pretty grim. I’ll never forget that first night. We were taken to Great Ormond Street, and they did all these tests. At the end of the night, they gave us some sort of evaluation of prospects, and they said it was not good. They came to us with a somewhere between 10 to 20 per cent survival rate. The doctors were very straight about his overall chances. Even on the nights where they said he might not make it through, they were preparing us for the very worst. But I always appreciated their honesty.”