Regardless of which team we support, there was surely a moment where each one of us stopped cold last Saturday evening.

I was travelling back from the superb 4-1 win at Braintree a week ago. It was a day on which I could think of nothing I wanted more than three points for and a good performance from the boys after a rotten couple of weeks.

The team had dominated football matches for a number of weeks but got nothing for their efforts. Defeat against Barrow, Wrexham, Fleetwood – you remember them. No, going down to Essex at the weekend all I was focused on was doing my bit to help the group as a whole get an important win.

And yet despite being delighted that this win did eventually arrive and in some emphatic style, too; there came a time on the trek home that football of all kinds just became completely and utterly irrelevant. News had come through that a player in the Tottenham-Bolton game at White Hart Lane had collapsed and was receiving shock treatment.

Then over the coming minutes and hours came the details – Press Association Images, as is their purpose and role, fed live images around the world (tastefully, in fairness) of players looking utterly shell-shocked and Bolton’s Fabrice Muamba laying prone under the masterful attentions of a raft of medical personnel.

All of a sudden you feel a fool for wanting three points so very badly when you see the game of football in the perspective afforded by this type of incident. This young man was hugely popular with team-mates and supporters, well respected in the game and, most importantly of all, was a loving father, fiancé, son and friend.

For a time – for a very long time – there was nothing. I’ll be honest, the thought was in my mind and the words passed my lips: “Oh my word, this poor boy has died, and in front of the world.” I’ve never been so happy to be proved well and truly wrong.

And yet, astonishingly, it has been proved this week that I had been scarily, eerily right. The former England U21 International had died – medically so, and for well over an hour as he lay without a heartbeat of his own and without breathing.

That he is now, as I write this, alive, breathing, conscious, coherent, responsive and almost jovial is beyond belief. The work of all the personnel involved, from White Hart Lane and all the way to the London Chest Hospital now he is convalescing was startlingly quick and of the highest order.

You cannot help but think, though. What if? What if Muamba had been, say, up in Wigan rather than down in London and at the heart of the country? I’ve no doubt that Wigan has its share of impeccable medical facilities, but you get the point. There is something vaguely miraculous about the whole affair and yet there’s no getting away from the fact that he was also extremely fortunate.

Many Harriers fans will remember that one of their former players, Matt Gadsby, certainly wasn’t as fortunate – the one-time Mansfield midfielder died in tragically-similar circumstances in 2006 whilst playing for Hinckley United, aged just 27.  There was, of course, former Manchester City player Marc-Vivien-Foe who passed away in the middle of a match three years earlier aged just one year older than Gadsby.

Undoubtedly, unavoidably, these two weren’t as ‘lucky’. Their friends and family weren’t as ‘fortunate’. They – much like those close to Muamba – would no-doubt have given anything in the world to guarantee the safety and good health of their loved one. Certainly that is a bigger ‘want’ than a need for a win or three points here this afternoon. Frankly nothing is even close to comparable and with the greatest respect, Bill Shankly was miles off – nothing is more important than life or death.

One final point I must make. As much as the scenes a week ago were sobering and as much as the fearful words of those who spoke were heart-wrenching, the one thing that made the hairs stand up on the back of my neck more than anything was the latest example of just how a big a unit the ‘footballing family’ really is. It’s normally a phrase that’s scoffed at, but it was demonstrated almost beyond despite when the thousands in attendance that night all roared on Muamba and those battling to save his life.

This perhaps more than anything is football’s greatest power.

… 1. I am not dead
2. I am very sorry that I have not bloggerised since September
3. Something very special is on the way to make up for it!

Well, it has taken me the best part of eight months – I am a very slow reader in the sense I’m a bit too busy to read as much as I should, rather than being dim! -  But I have finally finished Tony Blair’s autobiography, The Journey.

What a fantastic read; and one I’d particularly recommend. Be open-minded enough to take a look at it outside of political bias. I wouldn’t say I’m a fan or otherwise of Blair the politician, but Blair as a speaker, an orator, a communicator and a visionary, he is unrivalled in this generation.

Certainly his account is a fantastic review of his time prior to, during and post office as prime minister. Certainly in view of the personalities that followed him in Brown, Cameron and Clegg, he’s certainly missed.

He is open and honest about many of the controversies that surround his time in office and doesn’t shy away from the fact that they have made him widely disliked. Read it through, though. I’d be interested to see if whatever opinion you currently hold then changes.