Rugby legend’s dad pleads for support against motor neurone disease

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Distraught Geoff Burrow said MPs would be compelled to “do something” if they had to live with the disease like his 39-year-old son. Rob, Geoff and other family members have campaigned tirelessly for the MND Association since the former Leeds Rhinos star was diagnosed two years ago. But in a BBC TV interview he accused politicians of ignoring the plight of the 5,000 patients and their families.

He said: “If the MPs had to live one day, or one week, as a family, with somebody with MND, they’d do something. Please do something.” Geoff had urged the interviewers to leave his tears in the broadcast, adding: “Because we cry every day. Rob smiles every day, I don’t know what he’s going through.

“I know what we’re going through as a family and it’s cruel. People are trying so hard to raise money and we just want all that money and some funding from the Government to help.”

Former scrum-half Rob, from Pontefract, West Yorkshire, who played for Great Britain, deteriorated rapidly after his diagnosis, suffering weight loss and speech difficulty. He lives with his wife Lyndsey and their three children – Macy, nine, Maya, five, and Jackson, two. He now uses a wheelchair and speaks through a computer.

His father added: “It’s the hope, people with MND don’t have anything else but hope.”

Appealing to MPs he said: “We need targeted funding for those people. Funding for research is the hope and the end of the tunnel because there must be an end, a cure, a treatment found soon. It has for Covid and other serious illnesses. Please, please, fund it.”

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