The Daily Observer London Desk: Reporter- Judith Benjamin
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.”
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.
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.”
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.
