I had a drugs test each Monday and I knew I’d fail so I crashed my car... did it three or four times

Paul Tait had the world at his feet. And in his feet. As a prodigiously-gifted 16-year-old midfielder, he made his debut for Birmingham City and went on to score the winner in the 1985 Football League Trophy final.

With money pouring into the game via the Premier League, the 1990s should have seen his career sky-rocket. Instead, he embarked on a path of selfdestruction in which drink and drugs drove him to the brink of suicide. This is his story, as told to NEIL MOXLEY.

SIX years ago I left my house and went for a night out in Birmingham.

Thirty-six hours later, I woke up, partially clothed, by the side of a road in Redditch. It was 5am. I was covered in my own faeces, stinking of urine and covered in sick.

There were blue lights everywhere. Both the police and ambulance crews thought I was the victim of a hit-andrun. I’d collapsed. And to this day I have no idea how I got there.

The police contacted my wife, Emma, using my phone – I’ve no idea how the battery lasted or how they unlocked it – and she thought they were ringing to say I was dead. She was crying. I started crying. I thought: “I can’t do this any more. I need help.”

It hadn’t always been like that. I didn’t wake up one morning, when I was living out my dream of playing for Birmingham City, and think to myself: “I know, I’ve got a really good idea. For the next 30 years I’m going to get off my head on cocaine and every drug going, get into trouble with the police, and ruin almost every relationship.

Abused

“And, at the end of all that, I will sit in my garage and contemplate how to kill myself.’

I know now the seeds were sewn when I was younger. A familiar tale, I suppose. My parents split up – it happens – and I knocked around with the wrong lads.

I wanted to fit in because I never felt like I fitted in anywhere.

When I was 11 I was part of a little group of skinheads – my parents wouldn’t let me have my head shaved – on an estate called Castle Vale, where I lived.

These lads were older than me. One day they looked at me with my long blond hair and decided to set fire to it.

Two of them held me down and another burnt it off. The lad who did it went on to kill someone in a fight a few years later. That set the tone.

I was in trouble from a young age. Always in trouble. I was sexually abused at the age of nine – not by any family or friends, I must add, but by someone in authority.

I was angry. At school I sat in class every day feeling a burning anger.

I harboured disgust for anyone in authority. If I was told off I’d throw chairs. I was permanently suspended for something.

But I could play football. I could run and I could play.

When I signed as an apprentice for Birmingham City, my club, it was as if all my dreams had come true.

I made my first-team debut, aged just 16. I was earning £28.50 a week and my employers, who were in financial trouble at the time, expected results.

I wasn’t able to cope with the demands or the expectations, either mentally or physically.

As my first-team experience grew, so did my exposure to lads who were into hooliganism.

Then I picked up a bad injury and Birmingham sent me to Lilleshall to rehabilitate.

I felt I’d been abandoned as a kid and now I felt abandoned again.

By this time I’d dabbled with drugs. In short I was a disaster waiting to happen. Surrounded by drugs, by girls, by the wrong kind of people, and with no football to play. Any cash that I did have I was using for drugs. I fell into debt. I was earning decent money by now, probably about £400 a week, but most of it was going on alcohol and drugs, mainly cocaine.

Straight after a game – win, lose or draw – I’d be out on it. I’d stay out all weekend and come back in the early hours of Monday morning and then straight to training. I was in the first team by this time but, because I was under the spell of football violence, I wanted to get on the terraces with all my mates.

Once, when I wasn’t feeling well enough to play, I went with three coachloads of fans to Anfield for an FA Cup third-round replay (in 1995). It all kicked off. Of course it did.

Karren Brady was in charge of Birmingham at the time and she sent a taxi to my house.

The police had asked the club who the troublemakers were.

I’m looking at these pictures and I’m thinking to myself: ‘I know all of this lot’, but I said nothing.

I was in trouble – the people at the club knew it. One day one of my team-mates was caught with cannabis. Karren called a meeting threatening anyone who was using drugs to own up or be sacked. I admitted it – they were going to test me anyway.

The club and Karren were great. She tried to help. I was booked into a top clinic and I had tests every Monday and counselling every Thursday.

I wasn t able to cope - mentally or physically. I was a disaster waiting to happen surrounded by drugs and the wrong people.

Operation

But I knew I’d fail the tests. So pretty much every Monday I crashed my car.

The alternative was to be tested and be sacked. But I wasn’t ready to stop. I was addicted.

After that, it was a steady decline.

Crime – I can’t really say what I did, the nature of the crime – was the next border I crossed. How bad did it get?

The club paid for an operation on my nose. I had large chunks of it cut away inside because I wasn’t able to breathe properly.

It was a catalogue of selfabuse that went on for decades.

A couple of years ago I bumped into a girl I used to see back then. She told me we had split up because of my drug-taking.

I apologised to her and said I could not remember. I didn’t care at the time.

I was a narcissistic b ***** d, interested only in me, me, me.

She said: “Do you remember when you used to go to bed and you couldn’t sniff coke while you were asleep?

“Do you remember what you used to do?

“You used to chop up lines on the bedside table so that when you woke you had gear to hand.”

I apologised again. But was I surprised? No. I wasn’t surprised in the least. That’s just what addicts do.

After a game win lose or draw - I d be out on it. I d stay out all weekend, then go straight to training on Monday morning