Members News. Former Sky Blue Shotstopper Saves 43! ‘Happy Birthday’, Chris!!
Chris in the Sky Blue grey!
Today’s second Sky Blue ‘Birthday Boy’ is former Sky Blue goalkeeper (and CCFPA member) Chris Kirkland. The Association sends its best wishes to Chris who was born in Barwell on 2nd May 1981 and is therefore celebrating his 43rd birthday today!
Chris started out as a schoolboy then became a CCFC youth player in 1997 graduating to City’s Premier League team with a home League Cup debut against Tranmere Rovers in September 1999. He gained England U21 caps with City (and later a full cap). In all he turned out for the Sky Blues in 29 games before Liverpool came calling in August 2001 with a £6.25m fee. He made 45 appearances for the Anfield Club (going on to win League Cup, UEFA Super Cup and UEFA Champions League medals) before arriving at Wigan Athletic (initially on loan) in 2006 via a loan spell at West Bromwich Albion.
Injuries continued to restrict the continuity of his appearances and loan spells with Leicester City and Doncaster Rovers preceded a contract move to Sheffield Wednesday in 2012. Chris remained as first-choice goalkeeper throughout most of the 2012-13-14 campaigns but was overtaken as top shot stopper by the rise of fellow CCFPA member and ex Sky Blue Keiren Westwood during most of the 2014-15 season.
Chris was a free agent after leaving Hillsborough and on 12 August 2015 he joined Championship side Preston North End (and he announced he would wear the number 43 jersey, a tribute to former Sky Blues goalkeeper Les Sealey who passed away in the USA from a heart attack at the tragically early age of 43 in 2001). However, Chris only played a handful of games for the Lilywhites in the latter part of the 2015-16 season and, when his one year contract expired, took up another one with League One club Bury in June 2016.
Sadly, Chris left Gigg Lane, citing personal reasons, before the season started and has regularly since bravely publicly revealed his long term fight with depression in the hope that other people in the sporting professions will be encouraged to share a challenge that is a lot less rare than usually acknowledged.
Chris dicusses Depression in Guardian 12/10/2017
Another of our members, former Sky Blue forward Leon Mckenzie, has also publicly championed greater transparency within the game about the impact of stress on mental well being in the sporting professions (and we have also covered both their messages on this site in previous posts).
More recently Chris has been coaching with Port Vale from January 2017. He subsequently joined the coaching staff of Liverpool Women and was briefly their ‘gaffer’ for a month or so before reverting to goalkeeping coach and assistant manager. He resigned from both posts in March 2019 to concentrate on running his own Goalkeeping Academy and also, reportedly, to manage his recently launched mental health app. He was appointed as head goalkeeping coach at non league Colne FC in June 2020
He has also been busy during the recent coronavirus emergency providing advice and sporting exercises to help with the challenges of lockdown (see his twitter presence @ChrisKirkland43)
We would be very happy to see him again as our guest at a CCFPA reunion at some point in the not too distant future! In the meantime, CCFPA sends Chris ‘All The Best’ and hopes he has a very ‘Happy Birthday’ today!
