Tales from the Secret Footballer

Almost anything can happen in professional football: one moment a player is basking in the glory of a successful season, the next he is looking for a new club and realising that his world is a very small oyster. What makes each season fly by is that it is packed with incident.

The only thing my husband ever said with regard to his football career was that he was going to get to the top: he was going to play in the Premier League. He didnt care about being famous but he already recognised the by-products of being a successful footballer and hed goad our friends when we were out together: Your kids will have my name on the back of their shirts one day. Theyll watch me on TV and call me uncle. Hes always known how to rub people just hard enough that theyd back away from him.

At the club he still loves, and at which he spent much of his early career, he was hugely influential on the pitch: when he arrived they had nothing and when he left they were an established force in English football. And he isnt modest about that: if you ask him, hell tell you exactly what he thinks about his own contribution to that success. He was so important to that club that they would send him out on to the pitch hobbling on occasions. There was one season in particular when I dont think he returned from a single game without an injury of some sort a strapped ankle or a swollen thigh or cuts and bruises all over his face and body but he never complained. He would say to me, The best players get kicked. When I come home with no cuts on me, start worrying. Last season he came home with a 10in gash down his shin and passed out on our bed. At about 2 in the morning I felt the covers being pulled off me; it turned out he was making his way to the toilet and was dragging the duvet behind him because the blood had stuck his leg to it. Hes ruined so many nice bedspreads down the years that I stopped buying them long ago.

A few years ago he spent a week in Leicester having a course of injections in his knee; they administered Rohypnol because the doctor needed him conscious for the procedure, but it was extremely painful. One day there was a knock at the door and I opened it to find him looking as if hed been in a drunken fight. I laid him down on the sofa and his mobile phone rang. It said Physio, so I answered it and a voice at the end of the line told me that the hospital had lost him and were doing everything they could to find him. I explained that he was with me and the physio told me to keep an eye on him and wait for the Rohypnol to wear off which eventually it did. An hour later he walked into the kitchen, extremely groggy, complaining that his arm hurt. I pulled up his sleeve and he had the IV hanging out of his arm.

I remember once he had me in tears laughing while a doctor was trying to treat him: he was still in his kit as the doctor attempted to put 30 stitches into a cut above his eye. The doctor had said that he had wanted to do the procedure under general anaesthetic but then he made the mistake of saying that only rugby players had so many stitches without general anaesthetic. My husband lost consciousness at least once but when it was finished he said, There you go, doc. My eye is stitched up and all the rugby players still wish theyd been footballers, so what are you going to tell the next one that comes in here? You have to know how to take him because everything is a challenge, and so long as it is him who instigates it there is nothing that he cant do.

Neither of us would miss the damage that football has done to his body, though. It is bad enough watching him lose a match and the mood that it puts him in, but when he cant play at all because of an injury the atmosphere in the house really isnt pleasant.

He has been recognised by his peers and the clubs that he has played for. He has had some success and won trophies, but when he looks back and adds up the time that he spent playing compared with where he might be now if hed used his head instead of his feet, I know that he feels he made the wrong decision. He could be more respected, wealthier and, above all, happier. He feels that hes wasted the last 15 years of his life. It may seem ungrateful to say so, but I dont disagree.

Neither of us knew exactly what was going to happen once he started to play football for a living, but after three or four years he definitely changed. He became withdrawn. At first I thought it was because he was so focused, but years later, when I knew he wasnt taking his football so seriously any more, he remained the same. Hed crossed over into another personality and most of the time there wasnt any way to reach him.

Football, like life, can sometimes be absurd; a person might think that he is getting everything he could ever want, only to find out that it means nothing. When my husband got to the Premier League he didnt know why he was in the game any more: he desperately wanted to play football at the highest level and when he achieved that there was nowhere else to go. Simply surviving in the Premier League is enough for a lot of clubs for the players, the managers, the fans and certainly the owners but that was completely alien to him. I dont think he had seen success defined in those terms before and he was angered by it. Its easy to say now, but that was when he should have retired. Hed reached his goal; he had no plan thereafter.

When I look back to when I first met him, I recall that he had a picture of Kurt Cobain in his bedroom: it showed the Nirvana frontman slumped against the stage after a gig, sobbing uncontrollably, as if he had nothing left to give and nowhere left to go. At the time it was just a cool picture of a hugely influential person, so I never really asked him about it.

But a few years ago an article that had been cut out of a newspaper appeared on our fridge door. It told the story of what happened immediately after Pep Guardiolas Barcelona won the Fifa Club World Cup, to complete a clean sweep of every competition they had entered. Halfway through the article, somebody had picked out a quote in yellow highlighter . Guardiolas assistant, Tito Vilanova, had finally tracked the manager down; Guardiola, in tears, turned to him and said, Where are we supposed to go from here?

Its a question I hear a lot nowadays.

Mrs TSF