Outside the Box: Muamba describes the day he almost died 'like a dream'

Fabrice Muamba has described how he felt before suffering a heart attack on the pitch in the FA Cup quarter-final against Tottenham at White Hart Lane in March.

The Bolton midfielder said: "I could see Spurs players running around in the distance and I saw two Scott Parkers, then two Luka Modrics. That was when I realised that something was seriously wrong."

The 24-year-old added that he had felt fine right up to the moment when he collapsed unconscious after 41 minutes. "I ran upfield to try to get on the end of a cross from Martin Petrov on our left wing and as I ran back into midfield, I felt very slightly dizzy," he told The Sun on Sunday. "It wasn't normal dizziness, it was a kind of surreal feeling like I was running along inside someone else's body. It's hard to explain. Then I made another burst forward and noticed it again. But then my vision started to go. I had no pain whatsoever. No clutching at my chest or tightness like you see when people have heart attacks in movies. Then I started to see double. It felt almost like a dream. I just felt myself falling through the air, then felt two big thumps as my head hit the ground in front of me. Then that was it. Blackness, nothing. I was dead."

Referee Howard Webb called the match off when Muamba collapsed, and paramedics tried to resuscitate him on the pitch as players stood around him in shock. His life was saved by Dr Andrew Deaner, a cardiologist who was in the crowd as a Tottenham fan. He insisted that the player should be taken directly to the London Chest Hospital. Two shocks were applied on the pitch with a defibrillator, and a further 13 in the ambulance. Muamba's heart stopped for 78 minutes.

"It was pure chance that Dr Deaner was in the crowd that day," said Muamba. "I owe him everything."

He also described how he had felt healthy in the build-up to the Cup tie. "I had trained as usual all week and felt great. I've been playing professional football since I was 18 and have never had a serious injury. I've never had any problems with my heart or any major organ and there's no history of heart disease in my family. And on that day I remember feeling particularly fit."

Don't put your replica shirt on England unless it's very cheap

The world cannot get enough of Premier League kits. The 20 clubs will sell some 4,000,000 shirts worldwide this year and the manufacturers have paid the clubs more than £90m in kit deals this season, by far the highest sum for a major European league.

Although adidas and Nike share almost half the market across Europe's five big leagues (England, Spain, Italy, Germany and France), new names constantly appear; this summer Liverpool will replace adidas in a £25m annual deal with Warrior, an American firm enjoying a close relationship with the club's owners Fenway Sports. Manchester United will expect to beat that figure with their supplier Nike.

In contrast, South African fans still seem underwhelmed for some reason by England's efforts at the 2010 World Cup. A reader reports that at Johannesburg airport, their replica shirts have been reduced to 89 rand (£7.05). Don't all rush.

The evil Twins steal a march

Leeds United fans, already annoyed by the city's rugby league team, the Rhinos, using their song 'Marching On Together', are now in uproar over the wholesale lifting of the anthem by a less obvious outfit, baseball's Minnesota Twins.

Andy Sturdevant, the Twins supporter who adapted it, had to disable his Twitter account after less than favourable responses from West Yorkshire. When he posted it online he failed to credit Leeds but has been back-tracking furiously ever since. The song was originally the B-side of 'Leeds United', a single that reached No 10 in the British charts in both 1972 and 2010.

A ghastly video of Twins fans recording a karaoke version of what baseball teams alarmingly call their "fight song" is on YouTube.

Histon consigned to history?

There was little to sing about for Leeds fans when their side put the football outpost of Histon on the map by losing an FA Cup second round tie to them in 2008. It was the greatest day in the history of the Cambridgeshire club but since finishing third in the Conference that season, losing to Torquay in the play-offs, they have fallen away badly, finishing 18th and then bottom after chairman Gareth Baldwin left to join to local rivals Cambridge United.

Playing in the Blue Square Bet North this season has been no more successful as well as bringing costly trips to places as far flung as Colwyn Bay, Workington and Blyth Spartans. The vice-chairman and main sponsor has just left the club, who were forced to ask their manager, David Livermore, to take a pay-cut and appealed to supporters to help with wages until the end of the season.

Amid all this gloom there was a 10-goal extravaganza for the 313 fans who turned up last Tuesday to see the League game against Droylsden. But even then, having taken a 5-4 lead in the 89th minute, Histon were pegged back by an equaliser in added time.

Programmes and repeats

How many times has a different match programme been issued three times for the same game? After the first League Two match between Shrewsbury and Port Vale was postponed due to a frozen pitch, the programme was re-used for the re-played match with an insert. That game was then abandoned because of a fire in the second half.

On Wednesday evening, a season's best crowd of more than 7,500 were rewarded with a completely new programme to make a collector's item, or three.

Addicks higher than expected

It is approaching the time when pundits who made predictions at the start of the season congratulate themselves or pretend to forget condemning Norwich and Swansea to relegation.

Few can have been wider of the mark than Four Four Two magazine's suggestion that Charlton Athletic would end up 18th in League One, just avoiding a drop to the fourth tier for the first time in their history. That is the same Charlton who under Chris Powell remain on course to win the division with 100 points, having broken several club records.

s.tongue@independent.co.uk; www.twitter.com/@stevetongue