Prologue

Once there was a way to get back homeward. Once there was a way to get back home.

‘Golden Slumbers’, LENNON & MCCARTNEY.

It is the winter of 2016 and I am well.

If you were to ask me how I feel when I experience the lows we all go through, I might tell you that this will pass. I might even say everything is going to be OK.

I was once a professional footballer, but I’m not that any more.

I’m a football pundit, but I’m also a psychotherapist, a job which has given me more fulfilment than anything I’ve ever done.

I have a drink problem which, since 22 August 2011, I have treated by not drinking. I work in mental health. It’s good to talk, I believe that. But I believe even more strongly that it’s good to talk about the right things.

Life is complicated, but where I can I have simplified it and, yes, in the winter of 2016, I am well.

On this day, when I am well, I’m driving through Monkstown in south Dublin when a car crashes into the back of mine. It’s not a serious incident, but when I get out to check the damage, I begin to feel a little dizzy. Somebody helps me stay on my feet and I walk off the road and over to the pavement where I sit down. I’m not hurt, my car is fine and I wait for the light-headedness to pass.

My hoody is pulled up as far as it can go but as the dizziness passes, I feel something else. I lean forward, putting my head between my knees as if I’m bracing myself for impact. Then it comes. It’s like I’m under attack. I start sobbing: deep, frightened, threatened sobbing. The tears of a vulnerable and inconsolable child. I didn’t expect them, but they don’t surprise me. I know where they have come from. I know what I am afraid of. And now I know what I have to do.

I know there are things I’m still running from.

—

‘Why are you here today, Richie?’

It is 2008, a year or so after I returned from England to live in Dublin. I am in a therapy session.

My professional football career is over. Every morning I wake up and I feel I am out of control. I don’t know what each day will bring, but this prospect doesn’t thrill me. I live in fear of the wreckage in my life. I add to the wreckage every day.

I am not well.

‘Why are you here today, Richie? What was your reason for booking this session?’

Why am I here? I know why I’m here but I don’t know how I can say it. I could say that I’m struggling with retirement, but that would just be a euphemism for saying I live a life in freefall.

‘Why are you here today, Richie?’

The struggle of a sportsman’s early retirement is not why I’m here.

‘Why are you here today, Richie?’

The clocks stop.

I cut off eye contact and I scramble for the right words. I’m really struggling to say what I’ve come here to say.

Say it, you fucking wuss.

‘It’s OK, take as long as you need.’

Look at you. Mute little shit. Pathetic. What a man you are!

After a minute or so of total silence, I mumble my response as best I can.

From somewhere, I find the words.

I sob as I tell her, staring at the floor.

The therapist just lets me talk. She doesn’t try to fill the silence when I can’t. She is sound and supportive and really, really caring. The kind of person who would be perfect to speak to about this.

After the session, I sit in my car and cry on and off for about an hour. Her practice is in Dún Laoghaire and I can see the sea from my car. I know it wouldn’t be wise to turn the key. I just sit there crying, not knowing what to do. I can’t ring anyone to talk about what just happened. This is a secret and we can never be free of those.

I don’t want to go anywhere because I can’t face company. Sitting alone in my car is the best option. I suppose it’s the only option.

Well, apart from going drinking for two days. Which is what I do next.

The therapist has booked me in for another session but I don’t show up. I don’t contact her to say I won’t be showing up and I never go back. I turn on myself for wasting her time and not returning for the session, but I just want to put the toothpaste back in the tube. I want to keep my secrets where they belong.

I had a secret I believed I could never be free of. A secret I have tried to talk about over the years but which I have always tried to take back.

Don’t ask me about myself.

Let’s talk about you.

Don’t get too close.

Why do you want to know?

I felt overwhelmed by shame for most of my life. I felt I had failed. I felt I had let people down.

For a time it seemed I could succeed and make this failure OK. I went to England to become a professional footballer and I also played for my country. For a time I had the promise of success, and then I had that promise taken away from me.

I spent a long time mourning this career, which I felt I was entitled to do. I drank and drugged my way through this mourning. If your life had turned out like mine, you’d be entitled to do this, too.

I spent a long time running. And as I ran I took this secret with me.

—

It’s a winter’s day in 2016 and I’m sitting in the Second Captains studio about to record a podcast.

‘Jaysus, sorry about this,’ I say. ‘I’m all over the shop with this answer.’

‘Relax, it’s grand. Happens to us all,’ says Eoin McDevitt. ‘We can just go again when you’re ready.’

These lads are my friends. I trust them and I’m entirely relaxed around them.

I had lost my train of thought almost as soon as I started to speak. I couldn’t get to the end of the first sentence. I do my best to play down how rattled I am but I’m really worried that I won’t be able to continue. It isn’t the first time in my media career that I’ve needed a second attempt at an answer, but it’s the only time I think I might have to abandon the recording.

These aren’t nerves. This is something else. I feel the need to explain.

‘Ah, it’s just I have clients at the moment who have gone through shit like this and I just don’t want to phrase things clumsily, y’know? Last thing they need is to hear me put my foot in it on a podcast.’

‘Oh yeah, didn’t think of that. No hassle, we’ll go again whenever you’re ready.’

The lads sit patiently while I get my shit together. Avoiding eye contact with Eoin and Ken Early, I try desperately to clear certain memories from my mind. It probably only takes me about a minute to compose myself, but again it feels like the clocks have stopped. I take an extra-long gulp from my pint of water and say I’m OK.

‘Fuck’s sake, lads,’ I say, ‘it used to be fun coming in here. Can we not go back to moaning about Ireland being shit?’

I keep it together for the rest of the recording and don’t need another break, but by this stage I’m not short of practice in hiding my feelings. I have become skilled at pretending I’m grand at all times. I’ve had years and years of practice; years and years acting as if nothing ever happened.

—

Twenty-four hours after that podcast, a car collides with mine in Monkstown and every feeling comes pouring out.

I am sitting on the side of a road a couple of kilometres from the office of the therapist I had visited eight years earlier and I am sobbing again. The tears keep coming, but this is different. Everything is different now. I know what I will do. I will tell someone about this. I will lift the weight a little because I have learned there is no other way.

There is no escape and there is no way back home. Right here is where you live your life. This is where it’s at.

1

15 November 1989

‘I f you could ask anything of your father, what would it be?’

It was a November morning, and we were trying to help our father defeat the disease which had overshadowed our lives.

I was two months shy of my eleventh birthday and my brother Jamie was twelve and a half. We had grown up as the children of an alcoholic and we knew nothing else.

I considered the question and decided to go big. The room was packed. I knew my words would carry a weight they might not in emptier spaces or at lonelier times.

I had nothing to lose. Fuck it, I’m going all in.

‘I’d like him to take me to the World Cup next summer,’ I said.

The response wasn’t what I expected.

Instead of a ringing endorsement – a voice shouting ‘Hell, yeah!’ or ‘Take him to the fucking World Cup, you bollocks’ – the whole room just broke into laughter.

I desperately hoped the focus would shift to someone else.

The person who had asked the question was the facilitator for a group therapy session. My parents and Jamie were in the room too, along with eight other adults I’d never seen before. We were in a rehab centre in Wexford, visiting my dad, who was receiving treatment for alcoholism. My younger sisters, nine-year-old Anna and seven-year-old Catherine, had been sent to school as normal that day. They were too young, and probably too loose-lipped, to be told the full story. Kids that age shouldn’t be burdened with knowing things they’re not allowed to repeat. Our mother had shielded us from my father’s disease, protected us and compensated for our dad when she had to, but reality always finds a way in. There is no escaping it.

I wasn’t mad on reality myself. I was happiest when I was daydreaming. Whether it was imagining myself scoring at Wembley or Lansdowne Road, there was always another world I could go to. Dad taking me to the World Cup might have been a fantasy, but I thought this place, on this day – 15 November 1989 – was where I could share those dreams.

The reason I remember the date is not because it was a pivotal moment in our lives. I remember it because it was the day Ireland played Malta in their final World Cup qualifier. A win and we’d qualify for the first time ever. And if we did win, I wanted my dad to take me to Italy for the tournament.

It’s already tricky enough to talk to a room of adults when you’re only ten, but the laughter made me want to disappear. Noticing my anguish, the facilitator jumped in to help me.

‘What would you ask of your father, Richard? What would you most like him to do differently?’

I went for the honest answer this time. I asked for the thing I wanted more than anything else.

‘I just want him to watch me play football.’

If I hesitated about this, it was because I felt I was asking a lot of a man who did so much. Maybe I was asking too much from my dad. After all, he was a man who could do magic.

My dad was always my hero. John Sadlier might not have been winning All-Irelands or saving babies from burning buildings, but he could make chocolate appear from bushes. He could take us into a magical land of wonder where everything could change at any moment. A flower was not just a flower. A shrub in Marlay Park was not just a bit of greenery on the side of a path but an unending source of sweets and chocolates.

At Christmas, he was able to sneeze a fistful of Quality Street straight out of his nose. In St Enda’s Park in Rathfarnham, he could make bananas appear in the flowers. Sweets would fall magically from his woolly hat as we were walking up Three Rock.

When he took us to these places, we knew that everything could be overturned at any second. We just had to believe in magic. And I believed. I believed the magic was real.

If we were good, he would let us in on his magician’s world. If we all said the magic words together – ‘Alacazam’, ‘Hocus Pocus’, or whatever the magic required – the treats would appear. It worked every time.

He was my idol. For as long as I could remember, I’d wanted his approval and it was a long time before that changed. If it ever really did.

He could be as giddy as a schoolkid some days, playful and great fun to be around. He was very ticklish, too, and my sisters could have him in stitches in no time. When all my mum’s side of the family would meet in my granny’s farm in Cork, he was the adult who took all the kids on adventures in the woods. Like the Pied Piper, he was the one we followed wherever he went, always sure it would be an adventure we’d remember. And when it came time to build human pyramids, he would always be the one at the centre on the bottom row, laughing hysterically every time we came crashing down. I had the coolest dad of all.

But there was the other side, too. There were the times when the magic wouldn’t work. At those times, no spell could make the darkness go away. Then it wasn’t a land of wonder: it was a grey, miserable land. On those days, he was an angry no-go zone.

I desperately wanted the magician to come through the door each night, but we never knew which version of my dad would arrive home. Hungover, drunk or sober, take your pick, you’d know who it was before he said a word. His mood came in the door before him.

One night, he wasn’t happy to find the gas fire on in our sitting room when he arrived home. The room was too hot so he had a go at Mum for wasting money. In a tantrum, he stormed out to the pub. The following night he came home to a house with no fire on. It was colder than he liked it, so he had a go at Mum, using the temperature as his reason for spending so many nights out of the house. In a tantrum, he stormed out to the pub.

Some nights we wouldn’t see him at all, and Mum would be left to explain why his plans had changed.

I could never understand how he could change so much. I’d be afraid to make eye contact with him when this version came home. At those times, I’d silently leave the house with a ball and head for another world.

—

My dad came from a world of drink and drinkers. His parents, Dick and Aggie, ran Sadlier’s pub in Limerick city and their family of six children lived above it. Granda Dick bottled his own Guinness, sherry and wine, and he drank each evening on his own after hours. Dad was sampling the stock from the age of ten, swigging out of bottles he would deliberately overfill.

He’d pilfer from the till when the opportunity arose and head off swimming and fishing in the Shannon with his brothers. He told us he would mistakenly drink cider, thinking it was Cidona, before he hit his teens. I find that hard to believe as he was a bright kid, and an even brighter student.

He had to report for work in the bar within five minutes of school finishing every afternoon. Even if the bar was empty, he wasn’t allowed to be idle. Drinking on the job was frowned upon, as the more the customers drank, the more alert he’d have to be.

My mum, Mary O’Reilly, was from a pretty tough background herself. She was brought up in a sparse farmhouse near Kilbrin in north Cork with no running hot water, no central heating, no TV, no telephone, no luxuries – just cement floors and an open fire.

Mum and Dad met in their third year in UCC, where Dad was elected president of the Students’ Union. Granny Aggie suggested Dad apply for a job in the civil service, which brought them to Dublin. In November 1974 Mum went home to tell her parents that Dad and herself had bought a house in Dublin and were planning to get married, to which her father responded, ‘Best of luck to you, my child.’ She didn’t realise that those were the last words he would ever say to her. He died ten days later from a massive coronary.

Mum and Dad got married on St Patrick’s Day, 1975. It was just four months after the death of her father, which upset her mother Kate – known as Granny O to us – who did not want the wedding to go ahead so soon.

When my parents moved to Dublin, they settled in Ballinteer, later buying the four-bedroom semi-detached house in Broadford, a housing estate in the area, where we would all grow up.

By the time he turned thirty, Dad had four kids and a drinking problem. My mum held it all together in those early years. In addition to raising the four of us, she used to mind other children in our house during the week while their parents were at work. Our home was a lot of things, but it was never quiet.

Jamie and I would transform our house into a sporting arena. We would rearrange the sitting-room furniture to replicate a football pitch and wreak havoc with a tennis ball. Any breakages were blamed on neighbouring children who weren’t even there, but no matter how hard Mum tried to stop us playing, we persisted.

When we became obsessed with WWF, our parents’ bed became a wrestling ring. Jamie would give it the full Vince McMahon in the introduction and then we’d essentially beat the shit out of each other on the bed.

Every summer, my parents would take in foreign students for extra income. One year three bedrooms were needed for our Italian and Spanish guests, leaving all six of us to sleep squashed together in one bedroom – Jamie and me in bunk beds, Anna and Catherine on a sofa-bed, and our parents in the double bed. Mum told us it was a scheduling error, but I assume we needed the cash.

For Jamie and me, this was a great development. Now we could launch ourselves from the top bunk towards our parents’ bed, trying to bodyslam each other in true Hulk Hogan style.

We never had that kind of living arrangement again, but myself and Jamie would have been happy enough if the set-up had continued.

In many ways, we were happy. I had an older brother to play with, sisters I adored and, when I discovered football, something I loved, something I was good at.

But there was tension too, and much of that tension came from the uncertainty of wondering which version of our dad would walk through the door every night.

If you met me, you’d say I was a good kid. Certainly I was no trouble, but I didn’t feel like a good kid. I worried all the time and thought calamity was around every corner. I was a bed-wetter, something that continued into my early teens. I’d lean my mattress, covered in piss, against my bedroom wall to dry during the day. When friends called around, everything would be fine if we were playing downstairs. But if they wanted to go upstairs to play in my room, I’d have to disappear like a ninja to put the mattress back on my bed. They never understood why, even in winter, I’d leave my window open when we played up there.

When he hit his teens, Jamie rebelled. He kicked up a fuss about everything and ran amok. Being the eldest, he took the brunt of things in ways the rest of us didn’t. He was the first to stop believing in Dad’s magic.

At the age of fourteen, he ran away from home twice – three days the first time, six days the second. When I think about it now, it was a perfectly reasonable course of action in the circumstances. Back then, though, I hated him for the extra hassle he was causing Mum, who had enough on her plate without him piling it on. We went from playing together all the time to barely speaking, something which continued well into our teens. Looking back now, I realise we developed different ways of coping, but I also feel sad that my brother and I, who had together built an imaginary world, grew so far apart.

While Jamie rebelled, football increasingly became my retreat. It was the most reliable way I knew to get away from trouble. It was a means of escape but also a way to get my dad’s attention. I couldn’t exactly do magic when I played football, but I was good – good enough that, just maybe, he’d notice.

I was always close to my sisters, even if they developed their own ways of surviving as well.

Anna was just under two years younger than me and she always did her best to keep everyone smiling. She still does. As a child she was funny, lively and everyone loved her. We were allies from the very beginning and I can never remember us fighting. In any family row, we were always on the same side.

We spent hours together. If we weren’t playing, we’d chat about anything and everything. Our relationship has never really changed, even if I would test its strength in later years.

Catherine, the youngest, lost herself in the lives of her pets. My dad played his part in this too. Every time one of them died, he would preside over a funeral service at the patch of grass next to the shed in the back garden that was reserved as a pet cemetery. He would find a cardboard box and pad it with cotton wool for maximum comfort. Then he would stand next to Catherine at the graveside for as long as she needed. There couldn’t have been a more dignified send-off for Kevin the hamster and Erica the rabbit. And Catherine would be comforted through the loss of her most recent best friend.

Like Catherine, I loved animals. When I was eight, we got a dog and I called him Shambles. A week before his first birthday, Dad took him out for an early-morning walk, but Shambles was knocked down and killed by a Garda car on the newly built, unopened road behind our house. I remember Dad sitting at my bedside to deliver the news. I was heartbroken but I wanted to see Shambles. Dad brought me out to the car where the poor thing lay in the boot; thankfully his wounds weren’t visible.

I badgered my parents for a new dog almost straight away, and the following year we got a bearded collie named Bella. She was a very nervous dog: if you opened a can of Coke in her company, she’d run out of the room with the fright. I hope I never experience the terror she felt every Halloween night.

—

Football consumed me all the time. From the age of six, I was involved with teams, but that was only the official part of my relationship with the game. I didn’t go anywhere without a ball. If Mum sent me to the shop for milk, I’d have a ball at my feet for the journey. We weren’t allowed footballs in the schoolyard so I’d bring in a tennis ball every day to use in matches. While visiting my grandparents in Limerick, I’d dribble a ball through the streets on the walk to the local chipper, Krank’s Korner. When we visited Granny O in Cork, I’d be dribbling round the cow shit and potholes in the farmyard. I’d lob a ball in the direction of the odd cow when we were getting them from the fields in the evening just to see if I could get a rise out of any of them – first of all making absolutely sure Uncle Dan couldn’t see me. There are an endless number of ways a kid can find amusement on a farm, but kicking a ball against the wall of the derelict creamery across the road was all I needed.

My pocket money always went on Shoot! magazine. I wasn’t one of those kids with the best boots or the latest football strips. For two years I wore a pair of boots my parents had picked up in a car boot sale: they were too big, weren’t any brand and had cost £2. To make a point about how little football gear I had, I once reserved a shelf in my wardrobe for it, which was more or less empty all the time. My parents were amused but unmoved. Just get on with it.

Most of my childhood was spent playing ball in front of or behind my house. Good or bad days, alone or with mates, that’s where I wanted to be. I wasn’t meek or shy or timid on a football field. I didn’t feel subordinate to anyone. When matches weren’t going our way, I knew teammates would look to me to find solutions. I loved that responsibility. On my best days, I swear to God I felt invincible. I felt like nothing was beyond me – something I rarely, if ever, felt away from the field.

If we played football at lunchtime and it was a draw, I’d spend the afternoon going through the order of the takers for the penalty shoot-out after school or compiling reports of the game in my head. I didn’t get side-tracked by computer games or schoolwork because none of it could make me feel like football made me feel. I had my eyes on the prize. Sometimes the prize was becoming a professional footballer; sometimes it was anything that meant I didn’t have to think about what was going on at home.

Using the pillars of our driveway as goalposts, I’d be in my element, raining in shots on anyone who’d stand between them. And when nobody else was around, my imagination turned those pillars into Wembley Stadium with the crowd stunned at how incredible I was. I could transport myself to another world with a ball at my feet. And in that other world – relentlessly practising, relentlessly obsessing about who I could be, what I could do, how proud my dad would be when he finally saw what his son had become – everything was going my way.

This fantasy world was where I lived.

I knew I was good, which got me out of a few scrapes. One day my teacher, Mr Casey, a no-nonsense type, decided to punish me for laughing in class. The punishment was to write ‘I must not laugh in class’ two hundred times. However, we had a Gaelic match that afternoon and Mr Casey told me, ‘If you score five goals today, I’ll let you off ’. He said it in such a way that he obviously didn’t think I could do it. I always wanted to prove people wrong, so I went out that day, scored five