I'm determined that will never happen and, no matter what the result on a football field, at least I know now that I can enjoy life away from it. I now play football to win, not to escape; and I now live life for enjoyment, not to bet.

I took huge satisfaction out of winning the All Ireland but I always knew I'd have to return to a bookies soon after . . . that the glory would wear off and when everyone else left the victory parade I'd be left alone with nowhere else to go.

And maybe that was part of it.

You play out your footballing career on a stage, in front of 80,000 people at times.

There's noise, there's excitement from the crowd, there's gasping for breath and quick breaks and hard hits and intensity. You can't stop to think, even for a second. A lot is just reflexive but then the final whistle goes and everyone goes home. I, on the other hand, always wanted more excitement and more adrenaline. I could never go home and sit down for long after a game of football because I wanted another experience where I could win or lose it all.

By the time we won the All Ireland in 2002, gambling was already a huge and destructive part of my life. When I wasn't training and signing jerseys in the phone shop and smiling for the cameras, I was hiding away in some dark corner of a bookies, alone with a docket like all the other loners in such places. I had no real bills at that time. The phone came from work. I drove a company car. I lived at home in my mother's place and wasn't paying a penny into the house.

Everything I earned was going into my pocket on a Friday, in the form of a cheque, but it was quickly cashed and by the time the doors were locked and another week's work was done I'd already have placed my first bet. An hour later, all that work could have been for nothing and I wouldn't have enough money to get a sandwich on the way back to Crossmaglen. If people had known the truth, they wouldn't have come looking for autographs and signatures. I was a dark, lonely, depressed individual away from all the supposed glamour. I never played football for that, though; I played it to run and hide from my real self for just a few hours on a Sunday.

There was no real time frame. I can't tell you how much I lost on a certain day or month, or in a year. I don't know when the bad days were and I'm not so sure there were really any good days. I just know that the next seven years were a block of wasted time that could have been the end of my life. It got to a stage where I was lying on a bed in an apartment just down the road from the pub I had rented in Cavan, curtains closed to the outside world, depression eating into me and the thoughts of doing myself in racing through my mind because I had long since closed every door with an exit sign above it.

There was one day that I walked into a bookies with �6,000 and my last bet before leaving was �3. That's how low it can take you. Anyone with a problem could find themselves in that position but anyone with any selfrespect would walk away, realising their day was done. Not me. I walked up to the guy behind the counter, the guy who had watched me all day, and handed him three onepound coins and a slip with the name of a long shot on it.

I should have left at that point and gone for a coffee but by then I was lost in total desperation, and I was willing to do anything. A part of me even believed that this bet would signal a change in my fortunes:

'If this horse comes in, I'll have �30. All I need is for two in a row and I'll have �3,000.

Christ, a bit of luck and half an hour more and I could walk out of here with a tidy profit.'

I remember backing a horse at 100. . .1 and I had �100 each way on it. That's �12,500 I won and it gave me a sense of elation but only briefly. There was no point in me having that money, because a lucky streak only lasts in your head and it took me about two days to lose those winnings. I used to start going into bookies at 11.30am in the day and backing dogs, and I'd have no money left by the time the actual horse racing started. I needed a fix and I couldn't even wait past lunchtime. But even then it was just a bad habit, or so I kept telling myself.

I was borrowing money from friends, borrowing money from acquaintances, borrowing money from banks, so I could go and give the big time another shot. I was even selling the few bits and pieces that I had, expecting to win a fortune. But, of course, you never do and the money always ends up on the other side of the counter. Gambling is a game where the opposition always wins. I was always thinking of another bank I could hit. At one stage, I had a loan from the Credit Union, and another two from two different banks, for a car. I had a car all right, but I was still paying that off on hire purchase. So, I'd borrowed �40,000 for a car that I was still paying off at �100 a week on hire purchase.

Around the time I was selling phones, I got to know a guy from Cavan called Martin Lynch and we got on awful well. He was a partner to another fella called Peter Cullen and the two of them owned this pub. I left the phone place without anywhere to go or anything to do . . . I just got fed up and walked away from it. Then one day Martin called me looking for a phone and I told him I'd left that job.

He suggested I take over the pub. It seemed to be an attractive venture. For those first few months, I never gambled at all. That might sound amazing for someone with a serious addiction that has got the better of them for so long. But the days and weeks passed me by and I never gave it much of a thought; when it did cross my mind, I thought this must be proof it was no more than a bad habit, that I had just woken up and it had gone away, and then I'd go back to organising staff and stock and think no more of it. But March kicked in and the pub started to quieten down. There were times when there wasn't a sinner in the place and all this was new to me after the chaos up to that point. I drew breath, looked at the bank balance and found myself with �90,000, and it just clicked with me in a moment of weakness that Cheltenham was here. I said I'd wander down, throw on a bet and have some fun for a little bit . . . but just while the festival was up and running. Sure, don't Irish people love Cheltenham, and I told myself that when it ended I'd walk away like all the other people that were packing out the bookies and missing from my bar. But within hours, things were out of hand. I decided to get some more people in working for me. There was a girl there who was well able to run the place and could do as good a job as I could, so why not delegate? It was all to free up time. I never knew why I went back to the gambling so suddenly until it was explained to me many years later. Some counsellors told me that the whole lot had been a gamble. The pub was just another outlet. It wasn't a cure but a spreading of this disease.

I was supposed to be the happiest person in the world.

I'd always loved football and I ended up being good at it. I became a champion and achieved everything I had ever wanted to on one September Sunday in 2002.

But life was still shit after that. If I was depressed and lonely so close to winning an All Ireland, I thought that the further I got away from that moment the worse it would become. There were many times when I thought it would be a lot easier not to be around to see the man I had become when he got a little further down the tracks. Lying on a bed, in a room with no doors.

In such scenarios your mind tells you there is only one way out.

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'KNOWING THE REAL FRANCIE BELLEW AND THE DAY HE SPENT $2,000 ON TIPS'

As I drive home from Gamblers Anonymous' through the murky darkness, I look around and think about what an amazing place Crossmaglen is. Down that lane is Hearty's place. Since he conceded that goal against Donegal, he hasn't been himself, which is a pity because he's one of the real characters on this team. The sort of guy you need to break the monotony of life in an enclosed space with the same people. It might be a tale he tells or some act he performs on the pitch. It's never anything major and nobody else would take any notice, but we do and we feed off these stories . . . it keeps us sane when things aren't going well and it keeps us amused when we are winning. Hearty's life on a football field revolves around kicking a ball as far and as hard as he possibly can, and, given his huge frame, that's always quite a distance. Whether the situation calls for a short ball or not, he will open up the shoulders and belt it.

There was a story a while back that summed him up. He was at a coaching course for goalkeepers in Ulster and Packie Bonner had all the boys in a huddle. Hearty was there but drifted away after seeing a ball in need of a boot.

But the ball he booted ended up catching one of the guys in the huddle square in the face. As this guy attended to his reddened jaw, Bonner stared at Hearty with a look as bemused as it was angry.

I pass Francie Bellew's place.

Francie's a beast of a full-back who never played for Armagh and never wanted to until Joe took over for the 2002 season.

That was one of the first things Joe did when he got the job and one of the wisest too. He rang his club full-back and told him he was needed. Francie agreed but Joe was too cute to take him at his word, knowing that Francie was happy just ticking along with Cross. So Joe called at his front door the night of his first training session and physically put him in the car, like Francie was a child being dragged away to summer camp.

People always get the wrong impression about Francie. He's worked away in concrete with his dad and his cousins, put his head down and got on with it. He has never done an interview and never will, so people think he's shy and reserved. But far from it. We had won the club All Ireland in 1997 under Joe and our reward was a trip to Florida in January of the following year. We spent five days in Orlando and five days in Fort Lauderdale, and for the duration of the trip I was rooming with Francie. We were young and carefree and careless a lot of the time but this was the trip of a lifetime, with no time to waste. On our first night, we ended up holding up the bar in some nightclub. After that, the memories fade a little but we were still up early the next morning. Francie peeled his head off the pillow and talked in a tone that suggested he needed water . . . and fast. He was alert, though, which was strange after only a few hours' sleep and given it was 8.30 in the morning.

"How much did you spend last night, Oisin?"

"Not sure, Francie. Two or three hundred dollars, I guess, but, sure, we're on holidays.

Don't be worrying about that. I'm sure that was the idea of the two thousand they gave us to spend."

"I am worrying, Oisin. I haven't got a penny left."

It took me a while to stop laughing and we later worked out what had happened. Number one: it was customary to tip a dollar with each bottle of beer purchased. Number two:

American one-dollar bills look very like American hundreddollar bills. Number three: we were pissed.

"Hey, Francie, you made one waitress very happy. She must have thought you liked her a lot."

"F**k you, McConville. What'll I do?"

But he got by. Francie always got by. We all got by. Back then we were invincible.

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'TELLING MY MA WAS MORE DAUNTING THAN ANY BIG GAME'

There was a day when my brothers asked what I had been at. There was an outstanding bill from a cash-and-carry and they were pressing me about this and all the other bills that had been coming to my mother's house, asking me about any problems I might have. I just told them not to be worried by any of it, that I'd have it paid by the end of the week and that would be the end of it, not knowing where I was going to get the money. With that bill, there was nobody left to ask for a few quid and it never got paid, so my brother Sean rang me again and by now things were really getting out of hand. He said this boy in the cash-and-carry was threatening to go to the newspapers and tell all, and that he could already see the headlines: 'Armagh Star Can't Pay Bill', 'Inter-County Ace Bankrupt'.

So he went off and got the money together himself, paid my bill and told the owner before leaving not to be making idle threats or he'd be taken away in the back of an ambulance. I hated hearing that, because I never wanted to bring anyone from my family into it.

But it started a chain of events that led to my mother. I had to tell my ma, which was the most daunting thing ever . . . worse than any All Ireland final. I sat down and after going through a thousand different ways of telling her in my head I just came out and said it. "Ma, I need to tell you something, can you come here?" And you know what she said to me? "Thank God, Oisin."

Immediately, she let me off the hook . . . it should have been much, much harder on me. But I just told her and said I owed money; she never need know what the figures were because they weren't important and were all manageable. I told her I would get through this, that I just needed to get help. And I got it in the form of Sister Consilio's place in Athenry.

When I first walked in the door of that place I wanted to run as far away as possible. It's a place where alcoholics dry out and they were everywhere, and looking at them I was wondering how this was going to be of any use to me. I just wanted to meet someone, one of the nurses, and ask if this would do any good to me, someone that's gambling. When I did, they all said the same thing to me: it's not the same addiction but it's the same principle.

So I went in and was given a bed there, four in a line and eight in this room facing each other.

There were always a few people in that room but all were at different stages. Some might have been off the drink for six months, others might have relapsed and been there for only a couple of weeks. I sat on the bed and looked around, and there was one guy getting sick in a bucket on one side of me and another fella getting sick in a bucket on the other side of me. I hated it and I wanted to leave straight away.

Nowadays, any time I feel as though I'm having a bad day I remind myself that things could be so much worse. I remember where I came from and what I went through around that time.

It wasn't the guys in that room but some other people started to recognise me and wanted to talk about football. I was never one for telling people who I am but people working there and those in for addictions recognised the face from somewhere and started asking questions. It's the last thing I wanted to hear, or at least I thought it was. I was walking one day when I heard this south Armagh accent calling my name.

I turned around and it was a guy I had played football against at underage level. We recognised each other and I thought of us as kids running out onto a football field and all the ambitions we must have had. Maybe he was thinking the same thing but the two of us just stood there and were sinking in shame when we saw what we had each become.