The former Coventry, Liverpool and Wigan goalkeeper talks about dealing with depression, leaving the game and why players should not suffer in silence

Chris Kirkland felt trapped, paralysed, desperate. But the former England and Liverpool goalkeeper was terrified that he might have further to fall. “What happened to Gary Speed was the thing that really worried me,” Kirkland says, with reference to the Wales midfielder’s death in 2011. “I didn’t know how far away I was from that. Hopefully, a long, long way.

“I always ask myself: ‘Would I have done something to myself? Would I have harmed myself? I like to think I wouldn’t have done. I certainly didn’t sit there one night, thinking, right, I’ve got to … you know. But you think about it. You do, yeah. Because you don’t want to wake up.

“I said to my wife, Leeona, that I couldn’t wait to go to sleep at night and just be clear. But then, I didn’t want to wake up in the morning because it just starts again. I’d never have done it because of Leeona and our daughter, Lucy. But I was worried how close I was to the next step. That’s why I said: ‘I need to stop playing football.’”

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It was August last year and Kirkland was mired in a battle against depression – the insidious illness that he says started to creep up on him in 2012, after his departure from Wigan Athletic, a club he loved and did not want to leave. Kirkland had signed a one-year contract at Bury in June 2016 but he came to feel overwhelmed. He simply could not continue.

Bury were hugely supportive and the club’s manager, Dave Flitcroft, showed why he is cut out to be a leader of men. Flitcroft told him to get away, take his time, seek help but, Kirkland being Kirkland, he decided to give it one more try.

“I restarted training but, on the third day, I was in a five-a-side game, there were shots coming in and I just wasn’t diving,” Kirkland says. “I was thinking: ‘I don’t want to be here any more.’ I walked off, I went straight up to Dave and I said: ‘I can’t do it anymore. I need you to rip my contract up.’ That’s when the statement came out.”

In his statement Kirkland talked about how he needed “time and space away from the game”; that he was retiring at 35 after a 17-season professional career in order to put his “family’s future and well-being first”. It did not disclose the specifics of the depression. “It was because I was ashamed,” Kirkland says. “I wasn’t getting any help at that point. Nobody knew. But it was straight after that when I said to Leeona: ‘I have to do something here’.”

I was ashamed. I wasn’t getting any help at that point. Nobody knew. I said to Leeona: ‘I have to do something here’

It is sometimes referred to as the lightbulb moment; when it finally becomes clear that there is a fundamental problem. Kirkland reached out to Michael Bennett, the head of player welfare at the Professional Footballers’ Association, and the path to recovery would be illuminated.

Kirkland is no longer ashamed or embarrassed and he wants to tell his harrowing story so that others who are suffering in silence might feel the confidence to seek help. He is scheduled to speak at the PFA’s mental health and emotional wellbeing conference on Thursday at St George’s Park.

“It’s easy for me to talk about it now because I’ve seen a way out of it,” Kirkland says. “That is the biggest thing and I want other people and other players to know that you’ve just got to talk. I never saw a way out of it until I started to talk about it. There was a fear. But as soon as you talk, that’s when you’re helping yourself and your family.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Chris Kirkland in action for Liverpool at Deportivo La Coruña in the Champions League. Photograph: Javier Soriano/AFP/Getty Images

Kirkland sits in the lounge of his home in Aughton, to the north of Liverpool. Leeona is there, too, and so is the family dog, Sam. The veneer of comfort is inscrutable. Footballers have got it all, haven’t they? But depression is no respecter of reputation and it spreads furiously beneath the surface.

Kirkland remembers “crying my eyes out” when he said his goodbyes at Wigan after six years – he had fallen from favour under Roberto Martínez – and, although he would be the No1 at Sheffield Wednesday for the next two seasons, he could feel “things starting to slip”.

“As strange as it sounds, I managed to block it out during matches,” Kirkland adds. “I don’t know how. But the anxiousness was getting the better of me – with the travelling, for example. If I had to stay over in Sheffield, I was panicking.” Kirkland lost his place in the Wednesday team to Keiren Westwood in 2014-15 and he describes that season as “when it started to show; when I just wanted to shut down completely”.

Wednesday would still offer him a new contract for the following season but he did not sign it. “I was going to,” Kirkland says. “It was the first day of pre-season, I was in the gym and I was going to go up and sign my contract in the next 10 minutes. But something just said: ‘I can’t stay.’

“I went in and said that I’d got problems. I didn’t tell them what they were. I just said I needed to be nearer to home because of the anxiety of the travelling over there and being away. Would I get stuck in traffic? Would I have to stay over? They were all gobsmacked, even if they knew that something was not quite right.”

Kirkland signed a one-year deal at Preston North End but the downward spiral continued. He lost a dear friend to cancer at the beginning of 2016 while his dog, Max, died in the same week. Each was a shattering blow to his increasingly fragile psyche.

Kirkland has never been a big socialiser and was always uncomfortable with his position in the public eye. As the depression tightened its grip, he became reclusive. “It’s a big knock-on thing and, eventually, you don’t want to go out,” Kirkland says. “You don’t want to talk to people. You put your phone on silent and you don’t reply to anyone. I couldn’t wait to come home. It’s a vicious circle and you just can’t get yourself out of it.

“I couldn’t think properly. I couldn’t see a way of functioning. I didn’t want to get out of bed. I didn’t want to do the stuff that I’d always done. I just didn’t want to do anything. I wanted to shut myself off.”

Leeona says that it was like losing her husband for four years. Kirkland nods. “I wasn’t the person she married,” he says. “Leeona’s family are in Scotland, mine are in Leicester, we’re tight-knit and I’ve always taken it upon myself to be the man of the house. I was embarrassed that I couldn’t look after the family properly.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Chris Kirkland dives for the ball ahead of Chelsea’s Salomon Kalou in 2006. Photograph: Professional Sport/Popperfoto/Getty Images

“I didn’t know what was happening. Obviously, you read stuff and I had a feeling it was depression but I wasn’t diagnosed, at the time, because I never said anything to anyone.”

Kirkland felt he had coped with what came his way at the start of his career, when his uncommon mixture of height, agility and bravery marked him out for stardom. He became the most expensive goalkeeper in English football when Liverpool paid Coventry City £8m for him in 2001 – he was 20 years of age – while hyperbole tracked him.

David Platt, the England Under-21 manager, called him the “best young goalkeeper in the world” while Sven-Göran Eriksson, the England manager, described him as the “future of English goalkeeping”. Kirkland would win his one and only senior cap as a second-half substitute against Greece in August 2006.

However, Kirkland has since learned that it might have been impossible for him to compartmentalise the various demands and stresses. As Leeona puts it, they “pile up on top of each other before you get to a point where it all just explodes”.

When people say Chris Kirkland, they say: ‘Always injured.’ It’s not: ‘Chris Kirkland; he won the Champions League

Kirkland’s injuries are a key part of his story and the perception of him. He suffered terribly at Liverpool and during a season-long loan at West Bromwich Albion in 2005-06, when one of his lay-offs was caused by a laceration to the kidney that left him urinating blood.

The injuries themselves, to quote Kirkland, “knocked the stuffing out of me” but so, too, did the view of him as a serial crock. Post-2006 he had an excellent fitness record. “That’s one of the things that has griped at me – that people say I was always injured, when I wasn’t,” Kirkland says.

Kirkland’s other regret is linked to the injuries that held him back at Liverpool. “I always wonder, and I can’t help it, where I would have got to if I had been injury-free,” he says. “My career could have been a lot better. When people say Chris Kirkland, they say: ‘Always injured.’ It’s not like: ‘Chris Kirkland; he won the Champions League.’ Like the top players. That’s just another factor that has piled up.”

Kirkland might have won the Champions League with Liverpool in 2004-05 but, having started in four of their group phase ties, including the decisive 3-1 home win over Olympiakos, he was ruled out by injury for the remainder of the campaign. He was in the stands, together with Leeona, for the penalty shoot-out victory over Milan in the final and, to add to the insult, the team flight headed back from Istanbul without them.

“They didn’t wait for us,” Kirkland says. “We got left and we missed the parade. Apparently, my medal was given to somebody else. We watched the parade on TV but only for a bit. We had to turn it off. So, that was a bit of a kick.”

Kirkland reflects, too, on how he was only ever one error from being “crucified in the papers” – a goalkeeper’s lot is thankless – while he came to be more aware of the excruciating pressure in matches once he got to Wigan and relegation was a part of the equation. Then, there was the incident in October 2012 when, playing for Wednesday, he was blindsided by a pitch-invading Leeds United fan and punched in the face.

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Kirkland carries plenty of scars but they are beginning to heal. These days he will get out of the house and do something if he does not feel great instead of locking the doors. He has set up the Chris Kirkland Goalkeeper Academy for young hopefuls while he also coaches his daughter’s under-11s team. She is a goalkeeper too.

Kirkland says that he would like to get into counselling to help those affected by mental health problems and there is no doubt that his own sessions with a woman in south Manchester – facilitated by Bennett and the PFA – have changed his life.

“She has worked wonders,” Kirkland says. “I saw her at least once a week at first and now, I’m at once every two or three weeks. She’s given me coping mechanisms, such as breathing techniques, because I struggle a lot with anxiety; I still do. It’s an ongoing process but I now know that I can and will get through it.”

In the UK the Samaritans can be contacted on 116 123.In the US, the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is 1-800-273-8255. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is on 13 11 14. Other international suicide helplines can be found at www.befrienders.org. PFA members can contact the confidential wellbeing helpline on 07500 000777