MY SECOND SERIOUS injury within a year affected me badly. I was devastated. Why did this keep happening to me? All the strength I had shown during the months of intense rehabilitation after my anterior cruciate ligament injury now seemed to evaporate.
I didn’t realize it at the time, but my drinking began to really take hold during this period. Just as in my early days at Seton Hall, because I wasn’t in the team I began to struggle with my confidence again. Sometimes I would meet the girls in the bar after a game. I found that meant I would have to drink as much as I could before they arrived to enable me to feel confident by the time they all got there. I wasn’t playing so I was often the first one at the bar. And I was happy to do that. When I couldn’t fuel my confidence with my performances on the pitch, it had to come from my alcohol intake.
I had never stopped having a social drink with friends and team-mates during the first two seasons at Philadelphia, but not to excess. It would never get out of hand and it would never affect the way I played. But this time, recovering from a second serious injury in no time at all, I started to drink on my own. I found that drink numbed both the physical and mental pain. And this time I turned to harder drinks. The cheap beer was out and shorts were in. It wasn’t yet out of control but it was the beginning of something that would get that way.
It was incredibly frustrating not only to be missing so much football with Philadelphia but some important games for my country too. England came close to qualifying for the 2003 Women’s World Cup without me but fell at the final hurdle. Karen Walker scored two great goals – one of them came on eighty-eight minutes – in Reykjavik to earn us a 2–2 draw against Iceland in the first leg of the play-off semi-finals. And Amanda Barr got the goal that won us the second leg at St Andrew’s in Birmingham.
That meant a two-legged final against France. We lost the home match, at Selhurst Park, thanks to a goal scored by my Philadelphia Charge team-mate Marinette Pichon. And we lost the second leg at Saint Etienne by the same scoreline, 1–0. The goal that day was scored by Corinne Diacre. The most notable difference in the two matches was in the two attendances – 5,000 or so in London and over 28,000 in France! The French went through to the World Cup. We continued to wait for our chance.
It was hugely disappointing to miss out on these crucial play-off matches, particularly as I’d been hitting good form in my last games for England before injury, scoring two goals against Portugal in a 3–0 win in Portsmouth and also finding the net against Holland in The Hague in a 4–1 victory a few weeks later. Both were World Cup qualifiers. We were unfortunate again to be drawn against one of the top sides – on this occasion Germany – in our qualification group, but this was always going to be the case with our world ranking what it was.
Due to the outbreak of the SARS virus in China, the Women’s World Cup was switched to America again. The BBC came over to cover the tournament for Football Focus and they asked me to present some links and do some interviews for them. It was the first time I had ever been asked to do anything like that and it was good fun. It also kept me busy and positive. It was a shame England weren’t there, but we were getting closer with every qualifying campaign.
I was in California with the BBC when word suddenly came through to me that the Women’s United Soccer Association was in danger of folding. I was with the USA team at the time and whispers were flying around the camp that there were problems, which became bigger problems, and eventually problems that couldn’t be resolved. After that it was all over very quickly. I woke up one morning and it was there, and I went to bed at night and it was all gone. I couldn’t comprehend that. The day had started with me as a professional footballer, and ended with my dream job gone and me out of work.
Apparently it was all down to money. These things often are. The stories in the newspapers mentioned overspending by millions of dollars.
I burst into tears when the rumours were confirmed to be true. I felt so emotional about it because I felt that I had never got to show my true potential in the league.
Once it had all sunk in I had some serious thinking to do yet again. What did I do now with my life? I was in America only to play in a league that no longer existed. My working visa stipulated that it was for me to play in the WUSA. That job had now gone. So, in effect, had my work visa.
Germany beat Sweden 2–1 after extra-time in the Women’s World Cup final and began what would be almost a decade of domination in women’s football. Birgit Prinz was the Golden Ball and Golden Shoe winner with seven goals. She would soon be accepted as the best player in the world. The USA finished third, beating Canada in the third-place play-off. Third place on home soil did not have an impact on the game like the triumph of four years earlier.
Just a few weeks after the World Cup, the semi-professional W League started to recruit players from the now defunct WUSA set-up. It was a good standard of football but it wasn’t a professional league, which was a shame. Still, a lot of players from the WUSA moved over to play in it. Some packed the game in and didn’t play again, but most of us moved across to the W League. It was the best option available at the time.
It was certainly the best thing for me. I was at a crossroads in my life, but I didn’t really want to go back to England. I wanted to stay in America. I believed in America. I wanted to keep playing football in America. That is how the W League came about really. There were a number of top-quality players who wanted to remain in the country and play in the best league there could be in the circumstances.
I joined the New Jersey Wildcats, along with Marinette Pichon. Recovered from injury again, I was able to renew the partnership we had enjoyed at Philadelphia Charge. It was good to be back. In eight games for the Wildcats, I scored eight goals and made six assists. So once more I was proving my worth on the best stage around, which the W League now was.
Marinette and I shared an apartment as well, so we were best friends off the pitch as well as on it. We had an understanding that was natural. No matter how hard you work on things, sometimes the best stuff just happens. That was the case with the two of us, both at Philadelphia and New Jersey.
But, as had been the case with my whole career in America, the dark days were just around the corner. And the days to come were to be the darkest of my life.
The catalyst was the worst tackle there has ever been. And I mean every single word of that. It still haunts me to this day, how dirty the tackle was. I genuinely believe the intention was to break my leg. That is a very big thing for me to say, but it is how I honestly feel about it. It was just so vicious and unnecessary that there can be no other explanation for it.
Whether it would have happened in a professional league is a question I have asked myself many times. I will never know the answer to that one. The fact is, due to the professional league being scrapped, I was playing semi-professionally when it happened to me.
I am pretty sure that it was the nature and the intent of this tackle that sent me over the edge. This was now my fourth injury in a row, and it was by far the worst of them – from the cause, to the injury itself, right through to the mess it made of my life.
The fact that it was my fourth injury in four seasons was a massive factor. I think I had had enough of it all. There was no point in asking why this type of thing kept on happening to me; I just had to accept it and live with it. But, of course, that is much easier said than done.
I immediately knew that my leg was broken from the way she tackled me. There was no need for it, and that made the whole thing so much more difficult to accept. As I said earlier in this book, I can’t remember who was responsible for the tackle and I don’t want to know. When asked about it during the research for this book, I didn’t want to find out. I declined the request to do so. It is too painful for me. Even now, after all these years, I would much rather not know her name.
I know the match was against Delaware. And I know that it was a reckless challenge by a stupid player who shouldn’t have even been on the field. And that is enough for me to know and for me to deal with.
I had the defender on my back and I could sense that she was close to me when the ball was played in to me. So I had to protect the ball. I received it with the outside of my left foot and I had my arm up, because I was expecting some kind of impact from my opponent and of course I had to hold her off.
As the ball came in, I took a touch, and she just came straight in on my standing leg two-footed. The crack on impact told me everything. I jumped up in the air screaming, then came back down to the ground on my left leg. I couldn’t plant my right leg at all, because it was broken.
I hopped off the pitch and on to the sidelines and just sat there on the floor in tears, cursing the stupidity of the tackle and also the horrific nature of it. And I knew that that was it for me for another season – at least.
It was incomparable to the other injuries I had suffered. This was easily the worst of the lot. There had been absolutely no effort by her to avoid causing me serious, career-threatening injury. I had my body in line with the ball and there was no way she could win it. So she had to come through me to get it. There’s always a good chance a leg will get broken as a result of challenges like that. And I fully believe that she knew that. It is the only thing that makes sense to me in the circumstances.
No player should do that to another player, no matter what. In fact, she doesn’t deserve to be called a player, because she isn’t one in my eyes.
She wasn’t sent off. I couldn’t even say whether or not she was booked. I was in too much pain to notice. And literally to add insult to injury, I never even got an apology from her. Maybe it would have been a little easier for me to swallow if I had. It would have taken nothing for her to come up to me and say something. But she didn’t do that. There was absolutely nothing from her. It was just like the game was over, I was done over, and she had gone home to get on with her life. For me, that says it was intentional.
I was taken to hospital. My leg was X-rayed and it was confirmed as broken. I had a cast up to my knee. All my team-mates came down to the hospital to see me. They had to wait for me to leave hospital before we could return to New Jersey.
So it was back to another slow recovery. I did my bit. I would do some rehabilitation work for a couple of hours every day, but then it was home time. And this time, home time meant drinking on my own time.
Once again I found help in the form of alcohol. But it was different this time. This time I was getting drunk to numb the pain and block out the reality of a situation I could not deal with. I was back to where I had once been at Seton Hall. Only this time it was worse. A nightmare was beginning – one that I would endure alone.
Increasingly I withdrew myself from life. When you are out of the game for up to six months, what can you do with all your time? I had gone through that whole process twice, and for what? It seemed like for nothing. So I hit the bottle.
I used vodka to obliterate my sad life. But my life got sadder as a result. It quickly spiralled out of all control. I drank a lot – and I mean a lot: necking half a bottle of vodka on my own to put me out of my misery, downing the stuff every single night until I just couldn’t function any more. I drank hard so that I could no longer feel my senses. I didn’t want to feel. I didn’t like feeling. I didn’t like the way I was feeling. I had to numb everything, and the vodka did that.
It was really hard for me to cope this time round. It was the loss of the game that I loved again, and everything that went with it. It was all too much. I get such a terrific buzz from playing football, dribbling around players, setting up goals and scoring goals. Perhaps I would never be able to do that again.
It was such a downer for me. I was living with Marinette in this apartment. I would go along to training with her, but I would have to sit on the sidelines again, with my leg in plaster. It would often be swelteringly hot too. It was so frustrating for me. And it felt so unfair. At the end of the day, all I could do was go home and hit the bottle.
It was neat vodka or vodka and Coke, and I would drink until oblivion. Well, until I woke up the next morning.
I hated not playing. I hated feeling like a piece of shit. And that is how I felt at that time. Vodka made me feel better. Vodka made me feel happy. Vodka felt – for a while – like it could be the answer.
Of course, I didn’t realize at this stage in my life that alcohol is a depressant. So there was me thinking that the drinking was actually making me happy by getting me to forget about all my problems and worries when in reality it was making me feel worse about myself.
The situation was similar to what I had gone through at Seton Hall, only far more serious. The drinking had now got out of control. I look back now and I see it all as a big cry for help.
When I was once again able to train, I could still deal with the hangovers in the morning and I could still get through the day and do my rehabilitation work and whatever. That continued for a couple of months. Once my leg was finally out of the cast I started doing some work on the bike, and I naturally began to feel better within myself. I was working out a little bit and the endorphins were coming back. What was different this time round was that I continued to drink as I returned to some form of fitness. That was different to the previous times – a big difference.
I would try to tell myself, ‘Don’t have a drink today, Kelly.’ But I would fail in that quest. I found that I needed a drink. That I had to have a drink.
‘Alcoholic’ is a big word to use and to properly understand. But it’s true to say that at that point in my life I couldn’t live without having a drink. I absolutely hated myself for drinking as much as I did but I just couldn’t stop myself. I would become anxious without alcohol. I would crave a drink, so I’d give in and have a drink. The next morning I would despise myself for not having the self-control to say no. So it quickly became a vicious circle – one I couldn’t escape from.
One night I ran out of alcohol and I had to drive down to the local bar by myself to get a drink. I propped myself up at the bar alone, ordered the strongest drink I could think of, then downed a few of them. Eventually I managed to drive myself back to my apartment, where I passed out. I am not proud about drink-driving at this time of my life. I did it on a number of occasions. This was wrong. It was also, obviously, a very dangerous thing for me to do.
Drinking became an obsession with me. Soon I was at the stage where I couldn’t stop thinking about having a drink – or, more to the point, thinking about needing a drink. While sitting at home in my apartment alone, drinking by myself, those thoughts in my head got worse and worse. I have to admit that some of them were suicidal. I wanted to end the pain. I wanted to end the loneliness I was feeling. I don’t think I would ever have had the guts to do it, but the thoughts were definitely there. On a couple of occasions I went to the bathroom cabinet where I kept a tub of paracetamol tablets. I would hold the tablets in my hands and I would think about taking the lot.
Things would get worse before they got better, but luckily for me, at this point I was rescued. One day I broke down on the telephone to my dad, during one of my regular calls home, and he decided there and then to come over and bring me home. He was adamant. ‘I am coming to get you,’ he said. So he flew out and took me home. I had lasted seven years out there in total. It had been a long time. When I was happy, I was fine out there. When I was unhappy, I really struggled. It was a torrid time at the end and I had no choice but to return to England.
We had a lot to sort out in America. A lot of paperwork and a car to sell. All these things. But the biggest thing of all was my beloved Boxer, Bailey. It took a lot of time and money to get her to England with me. I bought Bailey out in Philadelphia so she had to go through a host of tests before she could come and live in England. There were all sorts of regulations to satisfy before she could even fly. We needed to get paperwork from the vet where I got her from. She had to fly without me. I was on a different plane with my dad. She then had to go into quarantine when she got to the UK, for four and a half months. The whole thing cost me more than £2,500.
The Americans come across as being well organized, but during that time my dad and I found that nothing could have been further from the truth. It seemed like everything we tried to do, somebody would put an obstacle in our way. As all this was going on, as we were driving around from one nightmare to another just trying to fulfil all obligations and get out of the country, we saw a car with a sticker on the back that said ‘God Bless the USA’. We burst out laughing at that. I think you could call it ironic humour. What a wind-up!
We had a limited time to do things and we kept being given the wrong advice. We also had to get a form signed by the state veterinarian, who lived an hour and a half away in Trenton, New Jersey. The whole business with Bailey just added to all the stress for me. It’s a wonder we all got back home safely. It was an absolute nightmare. You wouldn’t believe the jokers we came across during those few days. It was chaos. My dad says he had a bigger problem bringing Bailey back than he did bringing me back.
When Dad and I arrived back at Heathrow, we had an airport trolley stacked high with about ten suitcases on it. How the hell we ever got all that on the plane I will never know. The excess baggage payment was enormous.
I guess I linked everything that had happened to me with the States. I blamed the country for it all. Would the same thing have happened in England? I will never know. All I know is that I blamed all my troubles on America. There had been too much negativity over the last three years to feel anything positive about the States. I just felt like someone, somewhere was telling me that it was a bad place for me and that I needed to get out. So I vowed, there and then, never to go back. I was done with America. I actually hated the country in the end