“I turned my back on football for several years,” says Darren Eadiesaid “It was not because I didn’t like the game. It was because I loved it so much and that I could not do it . Imagine your fire – whatever you get up for – and then being told immediately you can not do it. Being told it’s OK as you can watch your mates take action. It’s so tricky.”
Retirement comes to every footballer than he could ever have envisioned, but the ending for Eadie came.
He had been a winger, including for those in Europe while still a teen. When he became the undercover member of the club’s hall of fame, he was playing. But knee injuries mared his movement to Leicester. At 28, his career was over.
“It was the shock than anything else,” he informs Sky Sports. “I’d had injuries to my knee before and always come back from it I always believed I would return from the next one. So to awaken from a surgery and also have my wife sat there and the physio sat there and the physician sat there telling me how my profession was done at 28 had been a large shock.”
Eadie had made 251 looks with 81 of these. He had been tipped for stardom but he was anticipating a long career ahead of him, even if his injuries had ensured those heights were not likely to be reached. Early retirement was not the plan.
Now the plan needed to change.
“It is like being thrown from a fish tank and suddenly you are flailing around on the floor not knowing what to do. It’s a different environment. This was the issue for me. It was. It had been that I was actually learning how to fit into society because it’s extremely different to being in a football changing room.
“You have this kind of resilience to you personally as a footballer. You then tell yourself that there is always another game round the corner if you’ve got a lousy game and you’ll have the chance to place it . That’s how I attempted to handle this. Try to enjoy my retirement and I was going to put it . But this quickly fades.
“It calls for different life abilities and you need to understand that pretty quickly. I think placing it upon the back-burner, in hindsight, was probably the worst thing I’ve ever achieved. I must have spoken to folks straight away. But I bottled everything up, put away it, coated it and attempted to put a brave face. After a while, that takes its toll”
Eadie suffered from melancholy.
There were tears. Panic attacks. Occasionally he couldn’t leave the home. Other times he needed to call his wife to come back and get him.
“It was a gradual process,” he clarifies. “In soccer, you need a little bit of anxiety to perform . Nervous stress is needed by you. However, that was a lot. I had been making excuses to not see folks. I made excuses not to go out. That is when you realise you’re getting darker and deeper.
“There has been a stage when I hit rock bottom and also my wife was fantastic at that time. She was having to deal with a child . I had been someone who was needy. You wind up hanging on their every word. All it’d take is one’wrong’ word and I’d be down at the depths again so that I think there needs to be more aid for those families too.”
Could football do to help?
“The problem when you finish early is that you are a commodity. Just as they may appreciate you once you are playing to them, when you’re done you are finished. You can not help them. I am able to understand that. It is a enterprise. However, when you’re dealing with human beings there is a little more into it than that. You can’t treat people like products.
“Times have changed. The understanding is so far better than it was. The manner soccer sees it, if you aren’t emotionally strong a supervisor will discard you because you aren’t emotionally right. They will just say how they can help and his mind isn’t appropriate without thinking about the reasons for it, to play.
“I do think the PFA needs to do more. Here is the largest sport on the planet but I believe in addressing these issues, baseball and cricket are way ahead. A great deal of time in football it’s only lip service. Folks today say what other individuals wish to hear and then don’t go back to it”
Life remains challenging for Eadie. Eighteen months ago he lost his mom to a brain haemorrhage. But the positive for him is that he’s discovering a way to cope with what life throws at him. He is in a place that is better. “There are always things to address in life but overall daily life does not look so bad anymore,” he says.
“You learn when you’re going through a terrible period. The fantastic thing is that when you’ve been through an episode before you realize there’s an end to it. The problem is whenever you’re going through it first time, you’re moving down and down, and you believe there is not any ending to it. That is when, sadly, individuals take their own lives.
“If you have an incident and get it through, that’s when you find they become shorter, you can cope and you also develop processes to deal with it. I would recommend anyone who has those sort of thoughts to see somebody and suffers those items. The longer you jar it up, the longer you wait patiently to see a physician, the more difficult it is going to be.”
Eadie is enjoying his job running a soccer programme for an independent college – at Ipswich of all places – and can be involved in another venture that is new that is exciting also. Before this season he helped launch a YouTube show FC Kitchen looking at food and soccer in a funny manner, aiming to increase awareness of the benefits of eating a diet.
“When you have kids yourself you are inclined to consider the bigger picture and attempt to be responsible,” he states. “So it is a tie-in in terms of veganism and consuming less meat. I will always eat meat but it is about studying how we could slow down our impact and providing a different. We’re pitching vegans against meat eaters.”
Eadie is getting fun. Pleasingly, his involvement in soccer is no more confined to his work at school either. After turning his back to the match, he is watching football . There is even a while for Norwich TV.
“It is normal to drift back into somewhere you had pleasant occasions,” he adds. “I am finding it more enjoyable watching football again now.”
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