Subject–Verb Agreement

Memories of trainee’s injury still haunts coach (The New Paper, 24 July 2009) is wrong; make it: Memories of trainee’s injury still haunt coach.

In Standard English, when we have a complex noun phrase as subject, the following verb agrees with the head noun, not the noun closest to it — that’s why we need the plural verb haunt to agree with the plural memories, not the singular injury.

The head noun is often (but not always) the most important noun in the noun phrase: if we were to choose only one noun to tell us what the noun phrase is about, we’d pick memories, not injury (i.e. memories haunt him).