The Irish striker Sunderland, Aaron Connollyrevealed that he has battled alcoholism for several years and said he spent a month in rehab this summer after realizing the addiction was killing him. The 24-year-old, who spoke openly about his alcoholism in an interview on Sunderland’s website to mark World Mental Health Day, pointed to his bright start to life in the Premier League as a teenager as the start of his downfall.
“I got everything a kid could dream of, but I couldn’t control my addiction,” Connolly said. He was 19 years old and playing for Brighton & Hove Albion when he scored his first two Premier League goals in a match against Tottenham Hotspur, his first start. “My phone blew up. It was one of the best days of my life but also one of the worst because that’s where the next five years started.”
“I stopped working. I started believing the hype and I wasn’t a good person after that. It was hard to be around me, nobody could tell me anything. I didn’t know how to deal with it, to be honest. I always told the my friends to my parents that I started living a footballer without a football part and that was the hardest thing to admit at that moment: that I wasn’t doing all the things I was involved in. It was painful to see and talk about.
“I had problems off the pitch and it was huge. I lost myself, lost my mind about why I played football, chasing things that I hadn’t chased before that Tottenham goal.”
An unmanageable life forced him to enter
Connolly scored eight goals for Hull City last season but says his life is falling apart off the pitch. While his joy once came from playing football, he began to crave more drunkenness afterward.
“At the end of July I decided that it was too much, that I couldn’t live like I was doing,” he said. “I kill people around me, my family and my friends. Mostly I kill myself.” He calls rehab the “best and worst” months of his life. “My life was unmanageable, I could not control my consumption and I came to a point where I had to decide to go to a treatment clinic. I told my agent not to contact any clubs. I didn’t doing it for the football, I’m doing it to get my life back.
Connolly signed for Sunderland in September at the end of his contract with Hull. He has yet to appear in a game, though he was on the bench in the 2-2 home draw against Leeds United in the Championship on 4 October.
Source: La Verdad
I’m Rose Herman and I work as an author for Today Times Live. My expertise lies in writing about sports, a passion of mine that has been with me since childhood. As part of my job, I provide comprehensive coverage on everything from football to tennis to golf.
