Around the block

Richie Sadlier had his football dreams smashed just as they were all coming true. In a revealing interview coming up to the tenth anniversary of his retirement from the game, he recalls his journey from the light into the dark and back again

His shift over as an RTÉ studio analyst for a Confederations Cup game this summer, Richie Sadlier went out with his fellow panellists Ronnie Whelan and Ray Houghton to celebrate a special occasion — it was the 25th anniversary of Ireland versus the Soviet Union at Euro ’88, the 1-1 draw fondly remembered for Whelan’s celebrated goal.

“Which was weird,” Sadlier observes, “because back in 1988, when I was nine, I would have been out practicing after that game, trying to do an overhead kick, with my left shin.”

That a former Millwall and Ireland striker should be waxing nostalgic in the company of a couple of fellow ex-pros might seem hardly worth remarking upon except that, by his own admission, it took the 34-year-old Sadlier a long and often distressingly painful time to come to terms with his own status as a former player. “When you’re a footballer who can’t play football, you feel pretty pointless,” he says of a pivotal time in his life when his dream turned into a nightmare and, at the age of just 23, he genuinely feared he would never experience happiness again.

Growing up in Ballinteer, football was the purest kind of joy to begin with, the young Sadlier never considering it a chore to spend nearly all his free time in relentless practice against a wall near his home. His commitment to expressing himself with two feet even trumped his mastery of two wheels. At ages eight and nine, he was All-Ireland BMX champion two years running yet opted to abandon the thrills and spills of that pursuit because the bike competitions increasingly clashed with his football at weekends. Always a centre-forward with a sharp eye for goal, he graduated through the ranks from his local Broadford Rovers through Leicester Celtic to the leading schoolboy club Belvedere where, after a couple of successful seasons as a teenager, he caught the eye of a scout for Millwall.

If all the objective signs were that Sadlier was one to watch, he was somewhat immune to the positive noises himself. “In as much as I always wanted to be a footballer, I was also always convinced I was shite,” he says. “I had those two things in my head all the time.”

Certain, therefore, that his first chance would also be his last, the prospect of a trial for the London club filled him with anxiety. “And I was absolutely shite in the game,” he remembers. “My touch was terrible, I was nowhere near the pace, I was physically bullied. I was really nervous, really bad, thought that I had to be ridiculously impressive every time I got on the ball.”

To his amazement, Millwall asked him back for a second look, presumably, he reckons, because they figured stage fright had masked whatever raw talent had prompted their Irish scout to send him over in the first place. And, this time, Sadlier did well enough to be offered a contract, although one which he only agreed to take up after first returning to Dublin to complete the Leaving Cert he felt would be a safety net if, and more likely when — as the internal voice never ceased to warn him — his football career went belly-up.

As it happened, his early days at cash-strapped Millwall seemed only to confirm his worst fears. Having struggled on his first few appearances for the club, a hernia problem sidelined him for most of a year. When he came back into the side there was little immediate improvement in his fortunes, the negative voice in his head now relentless in telling him he simply wasn’t up to the job of being a professional.

“And it wasn’t helped early on by thousands of Millwall fans echoing that back to me,” he says of a period when he became the number one target of abuse at The Den. “I got that all the time. I’d be booed going onto the pitch. Lucas Neill was a popular player there so I’d always time my run onto the pitch with Lucas because I thought their need to applaud him would trump their need to boo me.

“Match days would never be enjoyable. There was the walk from your car to reception, maybe no more than 80 yards, but full of people. When someone is a yard from you and they look you in the eye and call you a ‘useless c***’, that’s a different experience from 3,000 people chanting ‘shit, shit, shit’ at you. It’s only one person, but it’s more personal and it’s embarrassing — especially if you’re walking that walk with your parents or your mates from home over for the weekend. My attitude to it was: well, there’s elements of football that are really shite but it’s not going to change, so deal with it.”

And he did. Over time, he grew physically stronger and his confidence increased. And with the appointment as manager in September 2000 of Mark McGhee — who would soon be hailing Sadlier as “the best young centre-forward I have seen” — the goals began to flow for the striker, as Millwall won the League 2 title and, the following season, mounted a big push for promotion to the Premier League.

The breakthrough at international level was not far behind. Having already earned underage recognition alongside Richard Dunne, Damien Duff and Robbie Keane, Sadlier got his first senior cap under manager Mick McCarthy against Russia at Lansdowne Road in February of 2002 in what was Ireland’s first outing since qualification for the upcoming World Cup in Japan and Korea had been secured.

Suddenly, Sadlier found himself a player in a very different world.

“Among the squad, there was all these discussions — which I found really interesting — around how World Cup bonuses would be divided, tickets for the matches, sponsorship endorsements and so on,” he recalls. “And I was sitting there like I’m a supporter who’s wandered into the room. [Niall] Quinn and [Steve] Staunton were leading the thing and we were all given these forms to fill in: how many match tickets do you want? Do your partners and families want to be part of the official travelling group? When Quinn handed the sheet to me, I went, ‘There’s no real point in me filling this in, is there?’ And he just said, ‘Shut up, you fuckin’ eejit — you’re going if I don’t and my back could go any day’. And I remember saying, ‘Oh right’ and I filled it in.”

Indeed, Sadlier subsequently learned that Mick McCarthy had told Mark McGhee that his player would be called up for all of Ireland’s friendlies in the run-up to the World Cup.

“That’s when I felt, wow, this is what I wanted to be all those years when I was dreaming of being a footballer,” he says. “This is how I imagined it would be. I was in a team on the verge of getting in the Premier League, I seemed to be jumping on board the Irish squad at the right time. And it was great, it was brilliant and I was happy. Every box was ticked for a spell. I’d come through the difficult years and I remember thinking, ‘well, enjoy the good stuff now’.

“And then, three weeks after I’d played for Ireland, I did my hip.”

It was early March, 2002, in a game away to Barnsley, when Richie Sadlier attempted a routine shot and felt a sudden, sharp pain in his hip.

He stayed on for the rest of the match but was in so much discomfort afterwards that he couldn’t train on the Sunday or Monday before Millwall’s next game the following Tuesday night. He still managed to turn out for that one too but only lasted11 minutes.

It was decided that surgery would be required but, with the season holding out so much promise for both club and country, Sadlier pleaded for the operation to be delayed until the summer.

“They decided to try that,” he recalls, “so it was all about pain management, then rest, injections, tablets and trying to train but not really train and hope that everything would go well on the match day. Looking back now, it seems pretty ridiculous but the reasons for trying it were well worth pursuing at the time.”

At Easter, he managed to get through a full game, away to Rotherham, playing alongside Dion Dublin who’d been brought in as additional cover up front. Sadlier didn’t know it at the time but that, he notes now, turned out to be “the last 90 minutes of football I ever played”.

His World Cup hopes shattered, he then had to sit and watch Millwall lose a play-off semi-final to Birmingham City. “That was horrendous. That was fucking awful. I was on crutches at the time. Going down to the dressing room afterwards was a low point. We knew that Tim Cahill and Steven Reid would be leaving and, if I got fit, so would I. It really felt like the end of era.”

But worse, far worse, for Sadlier, was the devastating revelation that his own career as a footballer might be at an end too.

“When I woke up in the bed after the first operation, I said to the surgeon, ‘how’d you get on, when am I back?’ And he said, ‘Best case — 12 weeks’. And I went, ‘and while I have you, worst case?’ And he said, ‘Worst case, you won’t play again’. Which was the first time anyone had framed it as a career-ending situation.”

And that, he says, was the precise moment when the denial began to kick in.

“I never said it to anyone, to my family, to any friend, not even to the Millwall physio, though why I would have thought the surgeon hadn’t said it to him, I don’t know. But it was that stupid thing of: if you’d don’t talk about it, it doesn’t exist.”

Despite a disrupted pre-season, he reported back for action on the opening day of the 2002/’03 campaign, even though he knew he was nowhere near 100% fit. He managed only 30 minutes in the game and, afterwards, the pain in his hip again let him know that he’d allowed his heart to rule his head.

A second operation was proposed but, this time, it came with a serious health warning from the surgeon.

“He said: ‘It will probably only extend your career until your late 20s. You probably won’t be able to play every game in a busy period, like Christmas. You’ll need a specifically tailored training schedule. And you’ll probably have very difficult long-term problems’. And I immediately said, ‘Let’s do it’. Because I was 22 at the time and how I might feel in my late 30s seemed a lifetime away’.”

And so Sadlier went under the knife again but, despite pouring everything he had into his rehab, he found he wasn’t hitting any of the recovery targets.

“I couldn’t do the most basic things, like running, turning, rotating my hip. Every single day, there was a signal from the pain I was feeling but I was still great at putting it to the back of my head. I’d cling to some little positive. ‘I did this today and I couldn’t do it yesterday.’ It was all denial, I suppose. I feel a tosser saying this now but I had a swimming pool in the back garden at the time. One day in July, a few of us were messing around in it and I just jumped to catch a ball, something a 10-year-old would do, and my hip was killing me.”

Sadlier realised, after all the work he’d put in, there had to be something terminally awry if the most innocuous movement could cause such a severe reaction. In short, he knew that, at the age of 23, his game was well and truly up.

“But, again, I didn’t say anything. There were a couple of matches coming up that I wanted to play in. And I did. I played the last half-hour against Crewe and I played away against Stoke on a Tuesday night. And that was my final game in football. I knew before those games that I’d retire but I didn’t tell anyone. My mother was over for the Crewe game and I didn’t even say it to her. But things were so bad that even the journey up to Stoke caused me problems.

“A week later I went in to the doctor and the physio and said, ‘could I have a chat?’ And that’s when I told them I was going to retire. Up until then, nobody knew. I lived with my girlfriend and a mate of mine at the time and they didn’t know. So I came back from training that day and, as breezily as I’d tell you the time, I turned to them and said, ‘I retired there earlier’. And then I sent a group text to everyone: my mum and dad got the same text as the lads on the team and my mates in Dublin.

“My agent didn’t know and he was furious because he’d given me a £50,000 payment — how did he phrase it, ‘as a gesture of his long-term commitment to me’. So he rang me the following day, saying he wanted his money back or else he was going to court, which didn’t help where my head was.”

And where his head was, he explains, was in a very dark place indeed.

“I didn’t care about the money side because I didn’t care about anything,” he says. “Having to retire felt like a bereavement. I just cried all the time. And I thought the pain would never end. I knew it would be easier for me to walk away from football completely but the problem with that was where was I walking to? There was no other area that I thought I could offer anything in, or that I’d be interested in or that I’d be good at. That’s how at sea I felt. At the same time, I’d had seven years as a professional footballer, I’d just gotten insurance payments so what right had I to complain? So I put on an act. I was heartbroken and miserable but I didn’t want to burden other people.”

He also had to contend with a family tragedy: the death of his cousin Michael, who had cystic fibrosis, and who was just three years older than Richie.

“I was at the funeral and I had this weird experience of people coming up to me and saying, ‘Jesus, sorry to hear you’re finished’ at the funeral of a 26-year-old. I remember thinking in my head, ‘how dare you fucking complain about the end of your football career?’

“So I didn’t really talk about how I felt. I just went on the piss instead. I remember being in the manager’s office for the last time at Millwall. Archie Knox was the number two there and as I was leaving, he asked me what I was going to do now. And I said, ‘I’m going to go to the pub and feel sorry for myself’. And he just said, ‘Go on ahead, son, you deserve it’. And that’s what I did. And I was very grateful for texting because it’s easy to be breezy and light-hearted and put on an act via text rather than ringing people so they can hear from your voice breaking that you’re miserable. Or pissed.”

Were there ever moments when he felt life simply wasn’t worth living like that?

“There would have been, yes. I suppose it’s like any scenario where you’re heartbroken. I genuinely felt that the pain I was in was greater than any other person had ever felt before. And that it was never going to go away and that since talking about it was not going to reverse retirement, then why talk about it? These are probably things that millions of people in the world have felt but, at the time, I thought the uniqueness of my scenario was beyond help, that I was always going to be miserable and always longing for the thing I used to do but couldn’t do anymore.”

Seeing a counsellor helped dispel his darkest thoughts and, for the next two years, he tried to negotiate new paths in life, though they were ones that always intersected with his recent past: he completed a sports science degree, had spells with a football agency and as head of youth recruitment at Millwall and began doing media work in London.

And then, improbably, came another chance at a comeback.

Sunderland’s Scottish striker Kevin Kyle told him he’d had a similar hip problem resolved by a surgeon in the US who had developed a new procedure for treating the injury. Sadlier got in touch with him and, having been given a promising prognosis, decided to go for broke. Between the surgery, flights, accommodation and the time he devoted away from his other work to getting fit again, he reckons the whole effort cost him around a hundred grand.

“But at no point did I consider saying no because I knew the what-ifs would kill me,” he says. For 14 months he was “obsessive”, as he puts it, about his comeback attempt: he told his mates in Dublin not to come over, put his dogs in kennels, parked a social life and stayed away from the drink. Manager Mick McCarthy had invited him to train at Sunderland and he moved up from London and into a flat in the area. And it all seemed set to pay off.

“I was fitter than I’d ever been and I was running around and feeling very little pain in my hip. And then there was a three-year contract put on the table, with more wages than I’d ever been on before. I remember one day, Mick looked at the fixture schedule and there was a weekend where they would be playing Newcastle on the Saturday and at Old Trafford on the Monday, and he went ‘we’ll aim for around then’. And after all I’d gone through, in my head all I could think was, ‘wow, a Sunderland-Newcastle derby and a game at Old Trafford — happy days’.”

But it wasn’t to be. First, McCarthy got the sack and then in a training ground tackle with his caretaker replacement Kevin Ball, Sadlier sustained an ankle injury which required surgery that ruled out any chance of a comeback for the rest of the season. A second operation on the ankle was then deemed necessary, by which time chairman Niall Quinn had appointed Roy Keane as Sunderland’s new manager. “And then,” says Sadlier, “within a week of getting back from the second ankle operation, my hip went again in training”.

That, as he says definitively, was that.

Ahead of his farewell conversation with Keane, Richie planned to keep it short and sweet: he’d go into the manager’s office, tell him he was abandoning the comeback, thank him, say goodbye and leave. “But he said, ‘sit down’ and I ended up in there for a good while. And he was brilliant. He’d had the same hip injury and the same surgeon and he gave me bits of advice on what to do. I particularly remember him saying, ‘If you do go into the media, say what you think. Don’t be one of these people who hedges their bets, the industry is full of them’.”

One might easily assume that having his dream shattered a second time would have plunged Sadlier back into a deep depression. Not so.

“Nothing was going to be like the hammer blow of the first time,” he explains. “I was a couple of years older and I’d given everything. I’d gone to America for the surgery, I’d done all the rehab and it wasn’t to be. There were no more what ifs. I genuinely got to the point where it was okay. There was finally acceptance even though it took a few more years for me to find what else I wanted to do.”

After a spell as chief executive of St Patrick’s Athletic, Richie Sadlier has gone on to establish his credentials as an equally well-regarded pundit with RTÉ and columnist with the Sunday Independent. Indeed, such is his growing reputation as an analyst that he has just signed up for another year with the national broadcaster which will see him contributing to World Cup, Champions League and Airtricity League coverage as well as the new Second Captains show. Among other strands in his life, he is studying to be a psychotherapist and oversees football training in St Patrick’s youth prison where his weekly coaching sessions have helped in the integration of inmates from Dublin and the rest of the country. “It’s a real buzz to go in and do something like that,” he says, “and it’s something I wouldn’t be able to do if I wasn’t on TV.”

As the interview draws to a close — and with the 10tenth anniversary of his retirement from the game this coming Tuesday — it strikes me to ask Richie Sadlier if he ever has dreams in which he’s back playing football again.

“All the time, all the time,” comes the immediate response. Good dreams? “Oh yeah, great things happen,” he smiles. “I’m scoring goals, I’m doing the lot. And I feel that buzz again. It’s amazing. I’m sitting here talking about accepting that I don’t play football any more. And I do accept that. But even though you do come to terms with it in the end, that doesn’t mean you don’t think about the really good days, the days that were brilliant. Because it was an incredible experience to get up, go and train, play a match, score a goal, your mum and dad there, the lads over. That’s what I thought at the time was total joy, total contentment.”

So then, is it better to have loved and lost than…? “Absolutely. I’m 34 now and I’m much more grateful sitting here as a 34-year-old to be able to think back on the experiences I’ve had. The thing is, a footballer is how I saw myself from the age of eight. You’d go to family dos and the uncles and aunties would ask about the result of the match. As you got older, the teachers would ask how the latest trials went. Everyone spoke to me in those terms. And that was one of the hardest things about retirement — I was going to be known for something I used to do. It would be like being 40 and all anyone ever talked to you about is how you did in your Leaving Cert.

“But there are social scenarios now in which I would never even talk about football. And I genuinely enjoy doing what I’m doing — RTÉ, the column, the studying, the prison thing. There’s a balance in my life now that wasn’t there in the past. And I love it, I really do love it.”