Steven Reid: 'He had an aura yet he wasn't cocky. He delivered'

I am sitting on my own with a phone in my hand and tears in my eyes. Thirty-four years old and the last of the sunlight has faded from my career. So even though I knew from months previously that this day was coming, the emotion of the moment still slaps me hard.

I type as slowly, and as carefully, as I can but my hand betrays me. Tears flow while I stare out of this car window and look around at shoppers going about their lives and I can't control what's happening. Once or twice in your life you get something like this where everything you've lived through flashes in front of you.

And all of a sudden I'm thinking back to when I was a kid catching a bus, and three trains, to get across south London for training at Millwall with dreams in my head and little more than a few quid in my pocket. I think of the first time I was offered a contract. "There you go, Steven, £300," Billy Bonds tells me. "Make sure you give some of it to your mum."

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I think of a coach ride back from Maine Road. Seventeen years old. Out of my depth and sneered at by the Manchester City fans after one of my first games for Millwall. 'Am I good enough?' I wondered then. Seventeen years later, I had my answer. I'd made it. I had survived. Survived the battles with self-doubt and then the ones with injuries.

The reality is that a footballer's life is a strange one. Best job in the world? Undoubtedly. And that's why the prospect of losing your job is so scary. One year, just after I had become a father, I lay in bed with a cast on my leg for two straight weeks and wondered if I'd ever walk without a limp again, never mind resume a career. Way back then, there wasn't a plan in my head - just dark thoughts.

So all this came back to me as I sat with this phone and thought about what to write. I've told my family I'm retiring. Now I have to inform the world. I am the author of my own sporting obituary but am unsure about what to say. I type a few words into my phone but by the time I finish, I read back over what I've written and then press delete.

There wasn't enough pride in that statement. So I stared at the phone again and wrote from the heart, attempting to get across what it meant to me to be an Ireland player, what it meant to be a professional footballer, to have done it for so long, to have come back from the brink, to have gone to the World Cup, to have captained my country, to have found a way not just to walk properly again, but to play Premier League football again.

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So I try again. And this time the words flow: "With a heavy heart I announce my retirement from professional football. I would like to thank everybody that has been a part of my journey: my family, especially, but also the fans, players, staff, managers and friends that have made it a truly wonderful 17 years."

I tweet the message. I am now former footballer, Steven Reid.

And straight away the replies come back. And it's amazing to read them. As a player, you have no idea how people think about you, not in a dressing room, anyway, because it's such an alpha-male environment where the done thing is to laugh and joke and sneer and tease and not tell people how you really feel about them - until it's too late. And as I sat in that car, staring at that phone, thinking about all the people who'd helped me get through my career, grief hit me.

And it almost inevitable that grief walked into Robbie Keane's world last week too as he sat down to write out his statement, realising that this was it, that the thing that had dominated his life since he was 17, was now coming to an end.

It was interesting to hear him reference how so many of his life's landmarks centred around Ireland games; he buried his father in 2003 yet jumped on a plane a couple of days later to play a European Championship qualifier in Albania. He watched his son come into the world yet had to leave the labour ward because there was a plane to catch for another international. He saw his elder son's love for football, and understanding of what it meant to be Irish, develop during this summer's Euros. When you are a player, your football life and your family life become intertwined.

So it came as no surprise when he referenced how emotional he felt. Nor was it a shock when there was an outpouring of love and respect for him - from fans whose happiest memories were linked to things he did on the pitch, from opponents who'd remember a kind word he'd say after a game, from fellas he played with - David Beckham, Steven Gerrard, and pretty much every Irish player from Niall Quinn, who was there at the start of his career, through to Robbie Brady, who shared a pitch with him at the end.

It must have humbled him to hear those words but it is necessary too, because for years it seemed clear to me that Robbie never got the respect he deserved.

Read more: Life through lens helped keep Keane in the frame

For a period, around the middle of the last decade, I was in dressing rooms when Robbie was struggling with injury and remember him saying, 'Look if I have to take an injection to play, I'll do it'.

And he did. I've heard it said that the modern day player stopped caring about playing for their country. And it was utter rubbish. Few things in life matter more. Personally, I've so much to thank him for - because when I was first called up by Mick McCarthy in 2001 - I wasn't that sure of myself and remember once getting on the team bus to head to training.

Robbie, even though he was just a year older than me, was often the lad at the back of the bus, totally at ease with himself and with the older players in the squad, Quinny, Gary Kelly, Steve Staunton, Alan Kelly - everyone. But he'd mix and match with anyone. "Alright, Reidy?" he said and down he sat, up at the front, chatting away with the new guy, putting him at ease.

He was a character and he had character. If fans were giving him stick, he shrugged it off. There was a fearlessness about him as a teenager that I have only ever seen from two other players in my career. He had an aura about him yet he wasn't cocky. He delivered. Sixty seven times.

And that's the bottom line. Throughout my career, I came across all sorts. Guys who were mouthy and cocky but who disappeared from the game without trace, the kind who wanted all the trappings of fame that went with being a footballer but who didn't want to put the work in.

Robbie was different. He loved the work - not the fame. Fame was something he had to put up with and if there was a fallout from earlier in his career, when spiralling wages made some fans feel a disconnect with players, then you'd hope that they'd realise now that all he wanted was to do the best he could for the country he loved.

You don't stay in the game at 36 unless you love what you do. So for me, he's still that kid from Tallaght who practised for hours on the street and the parks, who made it onto the biggest stage and who - for years - never really got the respect he deserved. With 145 caps and 67 goals, it's great that has changed.