How does it feel to see 20,000 disappear in 45 minutes? Even with 15 years' distance from the fateful evening, it's a question that still prompts an almost visceral reaction across the body of Ciaran Feehan, as if the memory of a scarcely believable Liverpool comeback recalls a blow that is not mental but physical.

It was the Champions League final of 2005 - backing AC Milan to be lifting the trophy come full-time in Istanbul, the former Cliftonville, Glenavon and Ballymena United striker made the now familiar trip into a bookmakers in Newry town.

Once there, the bet was a simple enough proposition - the Italians at even odds. Double your money in an hour-and-a-half... even if, as in Feehan's case, your money happens to be a large pile of cash on a counter amounting to 10 grand.

Settling down in his living room to watch the match, he couldn't have asked for a better start, Milan's legendary captain Paolo Maldini providing a rare goal in the opening minute.

When Argentine striker Hernan Crespo added two more in the minutes leading up to half-time, Liverpool's race was run and Feehan's bet was won. At least that's what he and everyone watching assumed.

Unwilling to let those closest to him know the stakes with which he was now gambling, it was years before he told his Liverpool-supporting friend in the room that night how his every cheer felt like a slap to the face.

Today, benefiting from both hindsight and a better understanding of his condition, he knows that winning or losing mattered little.

The money wouldn't have solved any of his problems, wouldn't have paid the bills or got the bank off his back, wouldn't have kept the roof over his head or held his marriage together. With a bit of luck and a few compliant horses, it would have simply kept him in open betting slips through the weekend.

When the comeback pops up on TV now, as it so frequently did these past sports-starved months, he can even almost laugh. That night, though, there could be no such acceptance. As 3-0 unfathomably became 3-3, Milan unravelled in front of his eyes, the harder they tried to avert the disaster unfolding the worse things became. A feeling Feehan knew all too well.

Like so many afflicted with gambling addiction, it was the sport itself that used to provide the rush Feehan ultimately sought through wagers.

Born the youngest of seven brothers into a football-mad household, a Mitre size five thrown into the garden was a sure-fire way to keep the brood entertained from sunrise through dinner time. Of a handy bunch - one Bessbroke Wanderers team sheet would later contain six Feehans - Ciaran was the stand-out, and it was at Lisburn Youth where, aged 13, he caught the attention of Spurs.

In the same youth sides as the likes of Sol Campbell, Jamie Redknapp and Nicky Barmby, Feehan chased his dream in London through the tail end of the 1980s. With his father a regular visitor across the water, even as the games got bigger and bigger, for Feehan no feeling in football would better that of seeing his dad smile at him from the stands after another goalscoring performance. Ultimately, none ever would.

He'd make it as far as the Tottenham reserves, back in the days when the side turned out midweek at the old White Hart Lane, and when he returned home in the summer of 1990, he assumed it was only a temporary one. After all that's happened since, he'll sometimes wonder what life would have been like had he remained on the Premier League side's books that little while longer.

"I was never formally sat down and told by Spurs that I was finished," he says. "They told me that I'd get the three-year contract, and I was sent home to get my stuff together.

"I was shown the house where I'd be staying and everything. It was going home to basically say my goodbyes. At 17, you're still young, still naive, no agent or anything like that. And then when the rejection comes, there's nothing to help you deal with that.

"Still to this day, I don't know why they changed their minds. When I think about my story now, I look back at that time and it still plays on my mind.

"That rejection - I've never really been able to cope with rejection - had an effect on my life. I hadn't got the tools to deal with it."

By the time Spurs won the FA Cup the next season - led to the final by a Paul Gascoigne still riding a wave of unprecedented fame thanks to Italia '90 - Feehan had given away plenty of shirts, shorts and boots from the stars lifting the trophy at Wembley that day, the sort of mementos he assumed he'd have a career's worth of by the time he finished playing. Today, he has not one scrap of memorabilia to remember his teenage years at one of England's biggest clubs.

Back home, initially with Glenavon, there'd be goals and memorable moments aplenty in Irish football - a League Cup hat-trick for Cliftonville against Limavady in his first competitive start for the Reds 25 years ago this week and the goal against Distillery that sealed the title for promotion-seeking Ballymena United among the more notable - with Feehan striking those that played alongside him simply as a man who knew how to enjoy life on and off the pitch.

Play with Ciaran Feehan long enough, and you'd have a story to tell.

"If you ask anyone I played with, they'd have said I was outgoing," he says.

"I'd have been the sort that was described as a 'character'. I would have been seen as a motivator too, always chatting, an outgoing personality.

"But deep down, I was always very shy and now I know it was anxiety that I was dealing with.

"Even coming down here today to talk to you, it'd have been getting at me all the way here. Now that we're in the middle of it, I'll be sitting thinking, 'Why was I feeling anxious about this?'

"And the honest answer is that I don't know. I've asked people, I've tried, I've looked into it all, but it's just a mental thing that's with me."

While hiding the affliction undermining his confidence, Feehan certainly liked to unwind, but neither his drinking nor occasional trip to the bookies would have been seen as atypical for the scene. It was at age 30 he believes he lost control.

After a planned season in Australia turned into three, banging in goals for Bentleigh Greens and living beach-side with his brother Mark, he'd scored 26 goals for Armagh as they sought promotion in the 2003-04 season, firing the side into a promotion/relegation play-off. Trailing 3-0 from the first leg, it would take a miracle to come back at Solitude. Instead, the day was to prove the beginning of a long nightmare.

"I've watched the incident a few times since," Feehan says. "The ball came over the top and it was between me and (Cliftonville goalkeeper) Paul Straney - God rest Paul's soul for he's no longer with us.

"I knocked it over his head with my right foot with my left foot planted on the ground. He'd come out of his goal and in the collision my leg just snapped, tib and fib both shattered.

"I looked down and my leg was wobbling around from the middle of the shin, swinging like your arm does from your elbow. I must have gone into shock because I was trying to pull the foot round and back into place.

"I was near sick looking at it, the players that came over, you could see them looking down and having to turn away. Over in the Royal Hospital I knew it was going to be pretty much it for me."

Out of football and, having worked as a self-employed painter, out of a job, long and lonely days stretched ahead. To fill the void, he'd drink more and more, bet bigger and bigger.

"I'd always taken a drink, went out with the boys at the weekend after a match, but I'd had no major issues," he says. "And the gambling, I'd never gambled in my life until I was 19, and even then it was all small money for a long time.

"But that leg break was the turning point for me, things started to spiral out of control. I was sitting about the house with nothing to do and then I'd find myself in the pub. I'd be getting low, depressed, and if my head wasn't right, I'd do anything to suppress it. Just anything to give me a buzz, some escapism, an anaesthetic.

"At the start, gambling was just something that I did when I didn't want to drink, but when you're trying to find that something, the bets get bigger and bigger and, once you go bigger, you're not going lower.

"By that next year, the year of that Champions League bet, it could be two, three, four thousand a go. There'd be times I walked into the bookies with 10 or 12 thousand pounds and I'd walk out without the 80p to get my car out of the car park.

"It's disrespecting yourself, de-humanising yourself. That realisation - 'I've spent X amount of pounds' - it's not the money that you've lost, it's how it makes you feel. It degraded me and took me to a place that I never want to go again.

"They reckon an addict has a negative impact on 11 people in their wider circle. I was married, and I loved my ex-wife and I'll always love my son to bits.

"It's never that you go out to harm anyone but you're not just harming yourself, you're hurting everyone around you. You're not paying the bills, you're saying things that you normally wouldn't say, doing things that you wouldn't normally do... if I could turn back time, of course I would. But you can't, can you?"

To sate his addiction, Feehan resorted to drastic measures. He'd bet using credit cards, borrow huge sums from then compliant banks and, as the debts began to pile up, ultimately re-mortgage his house.

As technology advanced, he didn't even have to leave the sofa. Waking in the middle of the night, there was no wait for betting shops to open or the day's sport to start, his mobile phone opening up the possibility of getting his fix 24/7 from American racing or NBA basketball.

In a way you never could with drink or drugs, he could mask the severity of his struggles, placing bets online worth thousands of pounds so quickly that an onlooker would assume he was only sending a text message or reading an email.

The global financial crisis was to prove a reckoning. Banks that had once barely questioned what the thousands were for would suddenly not be so amenable. Having blown through upwards of 500,000 when property is taken into account, there was nowhere left to turn. His house was repossessed, his marriage ended and bankruptcy was declared all in quick succession. At his lowest ebb, his mind turned to suicide and, now desperate, he checked into the Cuan Mhuire rehab centre in Newry.

"My head went," he says. "I'd tried to hold it all together for five or six years but by that stage the head was gone. I was trying to be strong but I couldn't. It all fell apart, it was a breakdown.

"You learn a lot about yourself in rehab. It's hard, it's work, it's work every day and it still is.

"I still suffer from depression, and addiction will always be with me, but I think it's only now that I've got the mechanisms to deal with it.

"I might be alright all day and then some small thing happens and you don't snap, but it fires your head away off in some wrong direction.

"Life is like a sea; it can be calm, there can be waves and there can be storms. Like my father was rushed to hospital with a heart complaint. My father, my best mate... these are the things that are fired at you through your life and it's all how you cope.

"It used to be with drinking, or gambling, now I know when I feel those waves starting that I have to get the defences up."

For the first time in a long time, part of those defences are provided by football.

While he'd never reach the same level as before the leg break, Feehan had attempted comebacks before only to find little or no joy in the game.

But when fellow former Irish League player Brian Adair got in touch during lockdown to ask if he'd be interested in getting the boots on again for FC Mindwell, the revelation of the team's ethos convinced him to have one last crack.

Set to make their competitive bow in the third tier of the Mid-Ulster League next weekend, the team have been brought together in a matter of months with the goal of helping those suffering through mental health issues.

With Northern Ireland hero Keith Gillespie among the ranks, as well as a host of former Irish League talent, there is plenty of optimism surrounding the squad's playing prospects but, for Feehan, of far greater importance has been just how it feels to be enjoying something he loves.

"Playing before, I was getting nothing from it," he says. "Younger players today are a different breed. I'm not saying that my generation are dinosaurs but it's all different. Then this came along and it suited me perfectly. It's a great bunch of guys and they might have gone through some things, but there's no judgment, no judgment for what you might have done before.

"I've gotten a lot from AA (Alcoholics Anonymous) but there's a different buzz to this. It's amazing how football can bring people together off the field. The WhatsApp chats and things, after two weeks, I could feel my spirits had been lifted. I'm 46 now so I know I'll obviously not play every week, but I'm going to give it everything I can and it's started well.

"The first friendly, I was injured, just a calf niggle, but at the end of the game, I was proud. I've played at Wembley, White Hart Lane, Old Trafford but, I'll tell you what, see that weekend, I was prouder of being involved in that than anything else I did in football."

More here:

'It's de-humanising yourself': Ex-Tottenham prospect Ciaran Feehan discusses gambling addiction, anxiety and depression - Belfast Telegraph