The dying of the light and what professional footballers miss most

There comes a time with everybody when the magic goes and the show stops.

It's no overnight sensation. Age catches up, injuries become the theme. The pace and the mobility gradually slip away. The touch becomes heavy rather than deft. The fading of the light ain't pretty. Competitors will always fight it, but the fighting is always in vein. Wayne Bridge knows the feeling. The former Chelsea, Southampton, Man City and Reading full back is five years out of professional football and he misses those days like a hole in the head. The pre-season runs and fitness tests. The painful ice baths and the healthy lifestyle. He hated them at the time but little did he know that those gruelling sacrifices were what sustained him.

"When I retired, I was ready to retire, due to injury but I missed the routine of keeping fit almost straight away."

Every athlete will agree. When something is such a big part of your life, it can feel like a chore, a grind but you only appreciate how much a part of you it is when you stop doing it.

"Mentally, the pain is good for you," says Bridge on the most recent episode of JOE's Liquid Football.

Steve Sidwell couldn't agree more.

"I missed the pain. You know when you used to get home from an away game at 2.00 in the morning. It's a weird thing to say..."

And that's why the lads still haven't completely been able to leave the game they love behind them. "I'm still playing, I play on the vets team," says Sidwell. As you can imagine, that's a strange experience for a former Premier League footballer, playing alongside players who are nowhere near the level their teammates would have been. Sidwell sums up the change well. "It's completely different. You know you can't play certain passes because you know this is going to go over his foot or under his foot or it's going to bobble up and hit his knee. You've just got to accept that, it is fun...I love it, you still get the buzz. But when you do turn up at some of these games, you hear the whispers from lads standing there with a fag in their mouth, 'that's Steve Sidwell there.' Bridge, with his troublesome knee, finds it tougher to keep it up which is a direct contrast to Joe Cole.   "I play a little bit," says Bridge. "I find it really frustrating because I can't do what I used to do. My knee is quite bad so I'm alright in straight lines. But if I'm defending and someone tries to change direction...I'm lost...When you start losing them games and you're one or two nil down, it's really frustrating because I can't do it on my own. I've been in with Joe Cole in them games and he can do it on his own, he still has magic in his feet but I can find it frustrating when they look at me and go, 'come on, score a goal!' and I'm like 'I can't do it anymore!" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_iXKHs6rQZg