[Locke.]

Walking on to the Wembley turf for England, Lee Hendrie had the world at his feet.

The Premier League star earned £40,000 a week at Aston Villa. He had a fortune to spend on luxury cars and houses.

But beyond the roar of the crowd, a nightmare future was waiting for the cocksure young sportsman.

Today Lee, 34, reveals how he TWICE tried to kill himself after his career faded, he lost a *potential £10million in property deals and ended up with *£1million
in debts.

While his England under-21 team-mates Frank Lampard, Rio Ferdinand and Steven Gerrard went on to glittering careers, Lee’s life fell apart.

And today he tells the Sunday Mirror what he has never told even his closest pals in football: “I *seriously wanted to end it all.

“I had everything. I played for England at Wembley in front of my family, scored goals for Villa in front of 40,000 people. I was *playing with Lampard, Gerrard and Rio. I watch them now knowing I could still be in the top flight if it hadn’t all gone wrong.”

By 2010 he had lost everything.

“I couldn’t get a contract with a club. I had no money left, all the houses were going and everything just came tumbling down,” he says. “I felt I had failed my family and I wanted out... to end it all.”

Now he is fighting back – and this week he will marry fiancee Emma Cheal, 27, the mother of his two youngest children, who has stood by him through his darkest days.

It was her quick thinking that saved Lee when he made his first suicide attempt in August 2010. His life had sunk into depression over a career wrecked by injury and his looming money problems.

After a row with Emma he drove off in his car and downed an overdose of tablets with a bottle of wine in a car park. She called police who traced Lee by his mobile phone signal and told her where to find him. She arrived at the car park just in time to get him to hospital.

“I had texted my mum and sister, told them to look after the kids,” says Lee. “Emma rang me, I answered the phone. I was all over the place. She said ‘where are you?’ I said ‘don’t worry’ and put the phone down Next thing I knew I was waking up in hospital on a drip.”

But if that had been a warning, Lee failed to heed it. And last July he took another overdose as he realised his mum’s house and other family properties faced repossession. This time he was on life support for 24 hours.

He found tablets Emma had hidden and drove to  his mum’s home, where he grabbed more pills and locked himself in the bathroom. Lee says: “I knew everything was going under. My mum didn’t know I had the tablets and I got double the amount as last time just to make sure I did the job properly.

“I remember being sat on the edge of the toilet seat and then I stood up and looked at myself in the mirror and thought: ‘I am a disgrace’.

“That was it, the next thing I knew I woke up in the hospital. I had been on life support because the amount of tablets I had taken had shut my body down to virtually nothing.

“I was told the bathroom door was kicked off. I was in hospital five days. I made a lot of people angry and upset again.”.

http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/lee-hen...ttempts-830391

[King Gizzard]

Absolute waste of a talent

[Ramsay]

poor guy i remember thinking he was the next big thing