PHIL Manning, 37, organised yesterday’s charity football match between bus firms Thamesdown Transport and Stagecoach West. The annual event in aid of Prospect Hospice honours the memory of Thamesdown driver Colin Daley, who was cared for by Prospect prior to his death in 2014. Thamesdown driver and team captain Phil lives in Walcot and is married to Kelly. The couple have three children.

“I’M just trying to give something back,” said Phil Manning, who has organised the last two of three charity football matches played in memory of the late Colin Daley.

It isn’t the first time he’s voiced such a sentiment. As long ago as 1997, when he was 19, he and his loved ones spoke out in support of a Swindon Advertiser campaign to recruit blood donors.

He has little memory of the period, as he was in the midst of a challenge far more taxing than organising a sporting event. In 1996, while working at a fencing and garden wares business, an accident with a saw severed his left hand. It was reattached in one of Salisbury District Hospital’s first earliest reattachment surgeries.

It is not something he has spoken publicly about since; his more recent contacts with the media have been purely to publicise fundraising for the hospice, but Phil remembers the incident vividly.

“I remember everything that happened up to the time when I got to Salisbury. I was awake through the whole thing.

“It was the type of saw that you draw towards you – not like the ones you have these days where the wheel is pulled down – and I had my arm across it.

“I was only cutting little slots for trellis tops, the type that go across the tops of fences. It caught my jumper, tugged my arm underneath it and took my hand off.

“When it happened it just felt like somebody had kicked my feet from under me. I just dropped to the floor. I was still caught up with my jumper.

“It wasn’t painful then. The paramedics arrived and I got in the ambulance. They put drugs and drips in me and it started to throb then. That was when the pain kicked in.”

Phil was taken first to the old Princess Margaret Hospital and then in the Wiltshire Air Ambulance from the Commonweal School playing field to Salisbury for more than a dozen hours of surgery.

He spent four days in intensive care and began months of physical therapy.

He refused to allow the injury to divert him from his ambition to become a bus driver – or to keep him from the football field. At the time of the accident he was a goalkeeper with Wiltshire Division Four side Southbrook Walcot. He was unable to continue as a keeper but vowed at the time to return to the field.

“I was told that I’d never play football again, but it’s one of those things – you just can’t leave it.”

And the hand?

“I’ve got about eight-five per cent use again but when it’s colder I do suffer with it. People don’t realise how much it hurts, but you just have to get on with it.” Phil grew up in Covingham. His father is a retired bus driver and his mother a retired Patheon pharmaceutical worker.

“Being a bus driver was something I always wanted to do,” said Phil.

“When I had my accident I was 18 and took a year out to do my physiotherapy. I joined Thamesdown in 1997 – I think it was June or July. I was back at work just a year after the accident.

“I enjoy the job because of the freedom of it. You’re not stuck in an office, you’re your own boss and you’re not constantly being watched over.

“Once you’re used to the job and know what you’re doing you just get on with it.”

It was through working with Thamesdown that Phil met Colin Daley, who died aged 69 from the chronic obstructive pulmonary disease he’d battled for eight years.

“We were colleagues. We worked together back in the late 90s and into the 2000s. He was a good bloke and most people got on well with him.”

Since his death there have been three memorial football matches in aid of Prospect. Phil has organised the two most recent. The choice of charity was easy.

“Obviously, we chose Prospect because it helped him, and we’ve also had a family member who was helped by them. It was my wife’s nan. They helped her to get through it.

“We’ve always sort of kept them in mind rather than doing it for any other charity over the years.

“When we do this we’ll always do it for Prospect. They do wonders for people – they look after people so well.”

The care, he added, continues after a patient dies and their grieving loved ones need help. “It’s upsetting, but you can see the peace.

“Hopefully that’s what Colin had as well. Hopefully he got peace and he’s looking down now.”