Burnley defender Ben Mee has detailed the reassurance former Manchester City playmaker David Silva gave him after the birth of his premature daughter, Olive.
Ben Mee said: “So initially I didn’t know an awful lot about premature births, but I did know that David Silva had had a young, premature boy at 24 weeks as well and I remember seeing him at the airport, he was going back home to Spain to see his little baby who’d just been born,” he said in an interview with charity Tommy’s, an organisation that fund research into miscarriage, premature birth and stillbirths. I remember thinking, I think we’d just had [first child] Jaxon as well, he’s a similar age to Jaxon and around that time, I just remember thinking what he’s going through. Obviously, Olive’s born and our first game back, after lockdown, we’d gone back to training is Manchester City away so I knew David a little bit from my time at Man City, he was there, he’d just arrived when I sort of left there. We’re both the captains of the teams so before the game we meet up, meet the refs and I just mentioned to him, “how’s your son doing?’ and he said ‘doing really well’ and I said ‘I’ve just had a little baby, 24 weeks and we had just a little conversation and I wanted that bit of reassurance that everything was okay with him. To hear that was nice, I hadn’t really spoken to anyone, we hadn’t spoken to anyone that had had such a premature baby. I went back and it was nice to hear that his son was doing really well and just what a happy, happy boy he was so it was really good to hear that and I came away really positive.”
