“Dyche and the Premier League had left him behind. His last club in England was Barnsley, where, he says, he was “pissed constantly”. Halfway through the season he returned to Dublin, in effect retiring at the age of 24. It was a calamitous end to his career, but a future without football threatened even greater darkness, given the hours to kill at home. Crying in the bath at the prospect of his marriage to his long-suffering wife, Leann, going the same way as his career, he finally committed himself to sorting his head out and getting help.”
* * *
“Thanks to Powell’s dedication to discovery and his skills as a one-man renovation team, he managed not only to identify all of the previous tees and greens, hidden among the hills and foliage, but also to repair the course to a playable state. There were surprises along the way, too — like the discovery of ties to a certain course in Augusta, Ga. — and now he and the group were ready to tackle the Rhayader Golf Links once more.”
* * *
“The money was good enough to live on but some players supplemented their income with part-time work. At times, he took on remote research work from UCD but life was good. Reilly had an apartment in San Benedetto overlooking the sea and was playing well and scoring goals. One newspaper wrote an article on the ‘Only Irishman in the league’. Then the pandemic brought the world to a halt.”
* * *
“It shouldn’t take a young player dying to make football wake up to the fact that there are thousands of young players going through a system where maybe only one will go on and make a career out of football and it doesn’t prepare the other 999 of what happens in life. This has to be a top-down approach and all stakeholders should have to agree a set of standards and procedures related to a duty of care during and after they play for clubs. That’s psychological help but also alternative pathways.”
