How NOT to be a Football Millionaire - Keith Gillespie My Autobiography by Keith Gillespie

at Bangor. Loser. Then it was time for Newmarket again, and the sequence continued. I suffered a bout of seconditis. When the odds were favourable, I appreciated a good each-way bet. But on this afternoon, I was betting on the nose, and chasing losses. I upped the stakes to £4,000 a race and got one up. Then stuck another £4,000 on the next and lost it. From then, it was £4,000 on everything.
    I wasn’t keeping record of how I was doing – that was the danger of betting with invisible money – but I knew I was having a nightmare when the television informed me that we had reached the last race of the day, the 4.40 at Bangor, a National Hunt flat race for horses with little or no racecourse experience. In other words, a shot in the dark unless you were in the know.
    Just two and a half hours after a relatively sensible bet on a good thing at Newmarket, I was sticking £4,000 on a 12/1 shot called Dream Ride who was making his debut. He was from a good yard, but I had no evidence to suggest he was anything better than his odds suggested. It was just a hunch. I wasn’t in the know.
    Dream Ride finished 10th, some 40 lengths behind the winner. In vain, I had a few blind stabs on the greyhounds until they finished up for the day and there was nothing left to have a bet on. I called Mickey.
    “What’s the damage?”
    “You lost £47,000 today.”
    “Oh...”
    I pretended it wasn’t a problem, and put down the phone. But I knew it was a problem. I didn’t have £47,000. Not even close.
    But I don’t think I really appreciated the scale of it.
    My instinctive ability to block out negative thoughts kicked in. Did I cry? No. Did I throw stuff around the house in anger? No. I had my own way of dealing with things, which was to say nothing and try and forget about it. Put up the shutters. Delay and deny. Maybe it would have been different if I had physically handed over that amount of money but, at that stage, it was just a ledger entry in Mickey’s office.
    I lay in bed that night restless, but only because I was thinking about how to win some of my money back the next day.
    We were travelling to London at lunchtime so I was up and about early, studying the form. I called the hotline to Mickey’s again, and laid down a variety of bets on the horses and football. There was no mention of the day before. My bets were accepted, no questions asked. I can understand why they were so happy to take them. I lost another £15,000.
    On Sunday, a degree of realisation briefly set in. With no racing in England, I took a break from the betting and concentrated on the game. I reset my mind when I crossed the white line, and gave the Spurs defence a few problems that afternoon. It was only after I got home from London that I really began to appreciate my own difficulties.
    I called a halt to the phone betting, although I continued to have plenty of discussions with Mickey. It followed a pattern. He would ask where his money was. I would try to fob him off. When I scraped together a few quid, I’d send it his way, but it was a ticking timebomb. “I’ll get you the money,” I’d say to Mickey, “I’ve got money coming.” He was under the impression that a famous Premier League footballer automatically had thousands in the bank. Not so.
    I should have known that, in Newcastle, everybody eventually knows everybody’s business. Around a month later, Terry McDermott cornered me and said he’d heard that I owed somebody a lot of money. I denied it. Pride prevented me from telling the truth. But I didn’t have a solution. Instead, I went cash betting in the bookies again. I needed my fix and was hoping for a miracle that might somehow wipe the debt.
    Terry approached me at training again, and repeated the same question. My answer was the same. “No way, Terry... not me.”
    Over the winter, I was able to sort Mickey out with a few grand here and there, while promising I was good for the rest. The lie was less and less convincing.