Chris Kirkland: ‘I was taking 2,500mg of Tramadol a day. I had it in my goalie bag on the pitch’

October 9

Chris Kirkland was 13 when his father, Eddie, walked into a betting shop and asked what odds he could get on his son playing for England.

It has become one of those enquiries bookmakers get from time to time, but back in 1994 it was unusual. It elicited a few questions, like whether the boy in question was registered with a professional club. The answer was no.

The bookie came back with odds of 100/1, which prompted Eddie to put down a stake of £98.10 ($131 at today’s exchange rates). It was as much as he and various other family members could scramble together.

At the time, Kirkland knew nothing of this flight of fancy. He wouldn’t have fancied his chances, given he had been struggling to get a game in the under-14s at Barwell, his local amateur club.

“If I’d gone into the bookies’ with my dad, and they’d seen me, I’m sure he would have got a lot better odds than 100/1,” he says three decades later, at home in Lancashire. “I was very gangly. I wasn’t in the best shape.”

But he had been a revelation in his previous game, forced into emergency action as a goalkeeper, an unfamiliar role for him. “I must have done OK,” he says. “My dad must have seen something. I went from playing my first game in goal at nearly 14 to making my Premier League debut (for Coventry City) at 18. It was a rapid rise.”

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Chris Kirkland playing for Coventry City in a 2000-01 Premier League game against Manchester United (Clive Brunskill /Allsport)

It was extraordinary. In August 2001, aged 20, he became the most expensive goalkeeper in Britain, joining Liverpool in a projected £6million deal. He got his first senior England call-up at 22. The only surprise at that point was that a series of untimely injuries forced him to wait until he was 25 to make his full England debut in a friendly against Greece. Only then, at last, did his father’s syndicate get their windfall.

But his first appearance for England was also his last and, for reasons still not entirely clear, he never received the traditional cap to commemorate it. Only in the past few months was this brought to the attention of the Football Association, which, with a flurry of apologies, promised to rectify the matter.

And so on Thursday evening, 18 years on, Kirkland will be a guest of the FA at Wembley Stadium as England play Greece once more. At 43, he will finally get his cap but, more than anything, he is looking forward to the occasion for his teenage daughter, Lucy.

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Kirkland on his one appearance for England (Neal Simpson – PA Images via Getty Images)

For years, growing up, she associated his football career with torment and trauma — because that is exactly what it caused Kirkland as he found himself in the grip of depression and painkiller addiction.

It came to a head in Portugal in the summer of 2016 when, on a pre-season training camp with Bury, he “took a load of tablets” that sent him “mad” and left him dangerously close to taking his life. That was when he knew, aged 35, he had to walk away from football. It was killing him.

It is only now, having freed himself from addiction and pieced his life back together, that he has begun to feel able to look back on his career with pride.

In March this year, a ‘legends’ match took place between Liverpool and Ajax to raise funds for the LFC Foundation.

Alongside old favourites such as Steven Gerrard, Fernando Torres and Jerzy Dudek, there was a call-up for Kirkland, the first time he had been involved in such an occasion.

He only appeared for the final 11 minutes of the game, as third-choice goalkeeper behind Dudek and Sander Westerveld, but it was more than enough.

“I don’t class myself as a Liverpool legend at all,” he says. “But when they asked me, I thought how it would be nice for Lucy to see me play at Anfield. It was only brief, but it was amazing. I really didn’t expect the reception I got from the fans when I came on.”

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Kirkland walks out at Anfield for the legends game (Liverpool FC/Liverpool FC via Getty Images)

It felt like a homecoming. As a boy, he had travelled up from Leicestershire to stand on the Kop and watch Liverpool — his first game a famous 5-0 victory over Nottingham Forest in 1988.

It is just a shame that his own Liverpool career, for which he and others had such high hopes, never truly took off.

It was a strange deal.

Few people questioned Liverpool’s logic in committing to spend up to £6million on a youngster who, having excelled since usurping Sweden’s Magnus Hedman at Coventry, was widely regarded as David Seaman’s likely successor as England’s first-choice goalkeeper.

But it was certainly odd that Liverpool signed Poland international Dudek from Feyenoord on the same day. The succession plan was spelt out to him before he put pen to paper: Dudek, 28, for the short to medium term and Kirkland, 20, for the long term. But after one training session with the “awesome” Dudek, he wondered just how long he might have to wait.

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Being announced as a Liverpool player on the same day the club signed Dudek, another goalkeeper (Nick Potts – PA Images/PA Images via Getty Images)

Kirkland got his chance in his second season on Merseyside after Dudek suffered a serious loss of form, but an encouraging run ended abruptly when he ruptured the posterior cruciate ligament in his right knee after colliding with Crystal Palace forward Dele Adebola during an FA Cup tie.

Injuries became the bane of his existence: a broken finger; a broken wrist when he stopped a ferocious shot from Harry Kewell in training; a back problem that plagued him for years having initially flared up during another training exercise, this time a game of leapfrog; on loan at West Bromwich Albion in October 2005 he suffered a lacerated kidney in a collision with Bolton Wanderers forward Kevin Davies.

“I wasn’t injury-prone in the sense of someone who keeps getting muscle injuries,” he says. “It was a succession of freak injuries.”

They always seemed to come at the worst time: 14 games into his first spell as Liverpool’s goalkeeper, 11 games into his second, 14 games into his third. He played in that famous Steven Gerrard-inspired victory over Olympiacos at Anfield in December 2004 but was out of the picture by the time that Champions League campaign culminated with victory over AC Milan in Istanbul five months later.

Reserve goalkeeper Scott Carson (“typical of the guy he is”) offered him his winner’s medal afterwards, pointing out Kirkland had started four matches in the group stage. But Kirkland rejected the offer. He didn’t feel part of it, sidelined by a back operation and unable to see a future under Rafael Benitez.

After leaving Liverpool, Kirkland was largely untroubled by injury in four seasons as first-choice goalkeeper at Wigan Athletic, helping them stay in the Premier League and winning the club’s player-of-the-year award in 2008. He does not hesitate to describe that period as “the best of my career”.

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Kirkland making a point-blank save from Kevin Davies for Wigan (Clive Brunskill/Getty Images)

But the “injury-prone” label proved hard to shake off. It was a constant irk and is highly relevant to what happened next.

When Kirkland signed for Sheffield Wednesday in the summer of 2012, the club insisted on a clause in his contract that would allow them to terminate his deal if he missed a specified number of games with a back injury.

Kirkland was certain his back problem was in the past but he suffered a spasm two days before Wednesday’s opening game of the Championship campaign and was plunged into a state of anxiety and panic, fearing all the old injury problems and tropes were about to resurface.

In the past, he had been prescribed Tramadol, a painkilling tablet, when his back problem was at its worst. Feeling desperate, he took matters into his own hands, self-medicated, declared himself fit, played against Derby County and felt good again.

But it soon reached a point where he wasn’t just taking it for his back. He was doing it to try to ease the anxiety he had felt from the moment he arrived at Wednesday.

“It’s a great club — big club, great fans — but my problem was being away from home,” he says. “I was missing everything: picking my daughter up from school, watching her school plays, walking my dogs in the afternoon. All the stuff that was part of my routine when I was at Liverpool and Wigan was gone.”

There was also the drive to Sheffield — “only 70 miles each way, but a horrible commute, across the Snake Pass, and I would hit the Manchester traffic in the rush hour”.

“I started leaving at 5:45am and getting to the training ground hours before everyone else,” he says. “I got really anxious about it, so I started taking more tablets for the anxiety. I was on a slippery slope.

“Tramadol is meant to be a maximum of 400mg a day. I got to the point where I was taking 2,500mg a day. I was taking them out onto the pitch in my goalie bag. It wasn’t for the pain. It was because I was addicted. They were the first thing I thought about when I woke up and the last thing I thought about at night.”

Did anyone at the club know he was taking it? Or his doctor? “No,” he says. “I was ordering them on the internet. Nobody knew, not even Leeona (his wife).”

The World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) placed Tramadol on its list of banned substances nine months ago, meaning that an athlete testing positive for the drug during an in-competition test would face the prospect of a long ban.

Players have contacted Kirkland privately over the last couple of years asking for help in trying to wean themselves off painkillers. “I’m not saying it’s every other player, but it’s more than you would think,” he says. “It’s on the banned list now, but I wouldn’t be surprised if someone gets caught with them.

“They’re not performance-enhancing. They’re not going to turn you into Superman or make you save every shot that comes in. They’re dangerous. That’s the issue. I was fainting, heart palpitations, hallucinations, violently ill. They can kill you. They should have killed me. They nearly did.”

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The final years of Kirkland’s career were a struggle. It was a “relief” to lose his first-team place at Wednesday and then take a backup role at Preston North End, but it caused his professional focus to wane. At home, he became distant, remote, fretful. Despite his wife’s pleas for them to talk about his mood, he was vague and evasive.

“I was well into the addiction,” he says. “I couldn’t reverse my mindset, couldn’t reverse my addiction. I got worse and worse. I didn’t want to do anything when I got home, didn’t want to socialise, didn’t want to go out. Eventually, I didn’t want to play football.”

Kirkland planned to hang up his gloves after a year at Preston, but was reminded of that old pros’ warning: “You’re a long time retired.” He was persuaded to join Bury, who had been promoted to League One. He knew instantly it was a mistake — a reflection not on the club but on his state of mind.

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Kirkland looks on from the bench during his time at Preston (Ker Robertson/Getty Images)

The mere thought of a pre-season training camp at Portugal had him “freaking out”, feeling like a “wreck”. The first day’s training didn’t go well. “Then the next day I took loads of tablets and they obviously sent me mad,” he says.

Kirkland shudders at the memory of what came next: palpitations, hyperventilating, hallucinating and, almost like an out-of-body experience, finding himself on the roof of the apartment block in Portugal, in floods of tears, contemplating the unthinkable. “Enough,” he says. “I was going to jump off.”

At the last moment, he says, he “felt a pull back” — the pull of his family — and he called Leeona and told her he desperately needed help. “It was about half two in the morning and she said, ‘Let’s get you home and get you some help’,” he says.

Speaking first to Leeona and then to a counsellor recommended by the Professional Footballers’ Association (PFA), he confessed everything: the depth of his addiction, the lengths he had gone to in trying to conceal it, a growing sense of helplessness.

He came clean to Bury’s then-manager David Flitcroft, who he says was “brilliant”, and the club agreed to rip up his contract. He went “cold turkey”, withdrawing not just from Tramadol but from professional football. In a brief public statement, he said he needed to take time away from the sport for the good of his family.

For a time, it worked. Kirkland reached a better place, where he didn’t miss the drugs or the game. But then the withdrawal symptoms began to kick in. “I started to miss being a footballer. I missed the routine,” he says. “I thought about coming out of retirement, started training, but my body wasn’t having it. I had no purpose, I was miserable, I was down. I went back on the pills.”

Leeona spotted the tell-tale signs and intervened, begging him to go to rehab. He came back refreshed, with a new sense of purpose. Together, they went to his doctor and said that, no matter what the circumstances, Kirkland must never be prescribed painkillers. Acupuncture was the way forward.

But then came the Covid-19 pandemic, lockdown, new anxieties and a chronic relapse. Acupuncture was off-limits, so he found himself ordering painkillers online again. Innocent-looking parcels arrived from overseas. He has no idea what was inside those pills. All he knows is they almost killed him.

He talks of a “horrendous experience” and “not knowing who I was”. Out and about, he would become disoriented, barely able to remember the way home.

He was back in the same cycle: palpitations, blackouts, hallucinations, hopelessly addicted once more, lying to his nearest and dearest until the waves of fear became overwhelming again and, after pleas from Leeona and Lucy, he went back to rehab.

That was in early 2022. This time, Kirkland left rehab with a different mindset, knowing his life depended on beating the addiction. He owed it to himself, but above all to Leeona and Lucy, whose support he describes as “incredible”.

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(Oliver Kay/The Athletic)

This time the postman and delivery drivers were given strict orders to hand any suspicious-looking parcels straight to his wife. (There haven’t been any.) Beyond that, Kirkland assented to an arrangement where his wife could demand he undergo a drug test at any time. He has a testing kit next to him during our interview. He is proud to be able to look them in the eye and say he has been clean for two and a half years.

He is also proud of his work for the LFC Foundation, the PFA and various charities — not just by talking about his difficulties but by joining a series of fundraising walks.

That is his addiction these days, initially inspired by former Nottingham Forest and Wales goalkeeper Mark Crossley’s “Walking’s Brilliant” charity and now taking on a life of his own. Maybe it’s a goalkeeper thing.

“I definitely feel addicted to it,” he says. “I’ve done an hour in the gym already today but I’m planning to go out for a 10-mile walk later. Leeona will say, ‘Have a day off’, but I love being out there in the open with the dogs. If I don’t do it, I’ll feel like shit for the rest of the day. So it’s an addiction, yes, but it’s a healthy addiction. Unlike popping pills.”

It was his charity work, particularly in raising awareness of mental health issues, that recently earned him an honorary degree from Liverpool Edge Hill University.

That was when he was asked about his England cap and he replied that, contrary to convention, he had never received one. The university made enquiries without his knowledge and the FA, mystified to learn that one of England’s one-cap wonders had been left without an actual, physical, put-it-on-your-head cap as a memento, promised to put the matter right.

Before this week’s Nations League game against Greece, Kirkland will be presented with his legacy cap, number 1,144, in recognition of his place in the lineage of the England men’s team. He says his appearances for Liverpool mean more than that solitary game for his country, but he is looking forward to his trip to Wembley — and to the chance to meet up with his former Coventry team-mate Lee Carsley, now the national team’s interim head coach.

At a stage when many retired footballers start to find themselves in a rut, Kirkland, whose problems overshadowed a hugely promising career, feels he has rediscovered himself: finding a purpose with his work for the LFC Foundation, that warm Anfield reception at the legends game and picking up the England cap that was once likely to be the first of many. It is an ongoing process, but one loose end after another is being tied up.

By far the most precious, though, is a sense of reconnection with his family — of seeing his daughter grow up, reconnecting with each other. “You’re annoying,” she tells him from time to time. “But I’m so glad I’ve got my dad back now.”

Whatever you’re going through, you can call the Samaritans any time, from any phone, on 116 123 (UK) or 1-800-273-TALK (USA).

FRANK provides a confidential service in the UK to anyone wanting information, advice or support about any aspect of drugs. You can call free in the UK, from any phone, on 0300 123 6600.

(Top photo: Liverpool FC/Liverpool FC via Getty Images)

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