Chris Kirkland played for England and fulfilled his boyhood ambition of having the Kop behind him as a Liverpool goalkeeper.
But the most hard-earned achievement of his life arrived on a chilly Tuesday in April, marked by no more than an app on his smartphone silently ticking off 365 days clean from the prescription painkillers that he says, with jarring candour, were “months or even weeks from killing me”.
A year clean is something Kirkland is “incredibly proud of” and when he plots in painstaking detail how the battle was won, opening up on the emotional and physical toll of the journey he has been on over the last 12 months, you can see why.
Kirkland took his first prescription pill in 2012 to help with a back injury and found the mellowing effect helped soothe some of the aching isolation he felt commuting across the motorway to his new club, Sheffield Wednesday.
But he admits waves of anxiety “have always been there” in his life. His father suffered with depression and grandfather lost his battle with mental health demons. So it was perhaps no surprise that he was susceptible when he first took tramadol for a fairly benign back injury.
“Two days before I was due to make my Sheffield Wednesday debut I got an injury but I just thought ‘I’ve got to play’. People were already saying ‘Why have they signed him? He’s never fit’, which wasn’t the case,” he says. “I got hold of some tablets and thought ‘I’ll use them when I travel’ and it got hold of me quick. Any addiction does and it’s a very slippery slope.”
At the height of his spiralling addiction Kirkland was taking 2,500mg of tramadol and mixing it with solpadine and co-codamol on bad days. The recommended dosage is just 400mg. “It’s scary looking back,” he says. “I thought I was going to die.”
He kicked the habit in 2016 but relapsed badly during lockdown. “It was a testing time. I wasn’t the only person who just did what they had to do to get by then,” he admits.
The turning point came in March of last year when, desperate for more pills and unable to get another prescription from his GP, he turned to the internet.
“Within minutes of taking them I knew I was in trouble,” he says. “I don’t know what they were but they weren’t painkillers. I just didn’t know who I was. I didn’t know where I was or what was happening. I put ‘home’ in the sat nav and somehow managed to get home, then I was violently ill and slept for 18 hours.
“I got up the next day and flushed them down the toilet. I still had some proper ones in the house but I knew that day there was no going back.”
Going clean meant going cold turkey. “I had done it once before in 2019 and I was fine back then, I maybe had a sniffly nose for one or two days. So I thought I’d be fine, I’d done it before. But this was horrendous,” he says. “I wouldn’t wish those seven, eight days on anyone. I had hallucinations, constant sweats, cold, vomiting, aching and I cramped all over my body.
“I didn’t sleep for five or six days, basically. [My wife] Leeona slept in the room next door to me because I was tossing and turning and she came in to check I was still breathing properly. It is extremely dangerous and it’s not recommended but I didn’t want to taper off, I just didn’t want to put another tablet in my mouth.
“The seconds feel like hours but I made it through. Once you get past the six- or seven-day mark you have to start functioning again – ice-cold showers help, baths, going out for walks helped. Then it’s a case of having things set up so you don’t go back into them.”
Part of his routine is that the postman is not allowed to hand him any packages. His wife administers random drug tests to ensure he’s clean.
Now? “Ninety-five per cent of the time I’m really good,” he says. As if to prove his point the morning we speak he’s done a double spin class, shaking off the after-effects of a nasty chest infection. He thrives on routine and exercise, waking up every day with a purpose.
Kirkland is part of a walking group set up by former Nottingham Forest keeper Mark Crossley, works for the Liverpool FC Foundation and has raised thousands for foodbanks by offering goalkeeper coaching sessions in exchange for donations.
He wants to put his experience of mental health strife to good use. But there is no neat recovery path and he still struggles at times.
Kirkland is still on anti-depressants and occasionally suffers from mood swings that leave him feeling as if a “black cloud” is hanging over him. His doctors suspect he suffers from bi-polar disorder.
“I’m still going through a stage where three to four days a month I just can’t function,” Kirkland says. “I don’t talk. It feels like a black cloud is over you. You can hear people talking but it’s like you’re not there. It’s the lowest of the lows which is why they think it might be bi-polar.”
Doctors also believe there is a lingering impact of his addiction.
“When you’re on painkillers your seratonin levels change,” he says. “When you stop them your seratonin levels take time to build back up and it can take between 18 months and two years apparently so I’ve still got a little bit of time towards that.”
Kirkland misses football but has no plans to coach. He looks back on his career with fondness but admits injuries and his addiction prevented him from reaching his peak.
Sven-Goran Eriksson once hailed him as the “future of English goalkeeping” but he made just a single appearance for his country.
Still, he talks with awe of the managers he worked with.
“I owe Gordon Strachan everything, a special character and he gave me my opportunity. Steve Bruce was brilliant but Gérard Houllier was just a special person,” he says. “It was his team that won the Champions League in 2005 really. He lived football, but he wanted to know about your family, how you were doing, he cared deeply. He knew how important your off-field life was.
“He came back too soon after his illness. He didn’t look well, he looked very frail and he was just never the same again, unfortunately. We lost him a couple of years ago and I went to the memorial at Anfield. It was very, very emotional.”
He is too humble to say so, but Kirkland is probably affecting more lives now than he did during his career by talking with searing honesty about his addiction, offering snippets of advice on social media.
“When you’re an addict you’re sneaky, you know you can get away with it, hiding them all around the house, in the sock drawer or under the bed,” he says. “So it just feels so liberating being honest about it, talking about it. You can’t have little secrets any more.”
Next month he will play his first game of football “for years” at Doncaster Rovers, part of the Walking’s Brilliant team that will take on a Harry’s Heroes XI supporting a variety of mental health charities. Paul Merson and Neil Ruddock will feature, Harry Redknapp will manage one of the teams.
“I’m playing the first half in goal and second half on the pitch. My back is temperamental so I hope I’m OK but [my daughter] Lucy is going to start training me up in the garden soon,” he says. He can’t wait.
“Before, when I was on the pills I used to do things like that and I couldn’t wait to get away so I could go home and take one. Now I take my time to enjoy it and make the most of it,” Kirkland says. He sounds like he has found peace.
i made a donation to Fans Supporting Foodbanks for this interview. To find out more about their work or to donate, visit facebook.com/FansSupportingFooddbanks
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