"There was a time when I thought about quitting football. I thought about quitting because, after Istanbul, nothing made sense any more. The 2005 Champions League final simply suffocated me.

"To most people's minds, the reason we lost on penalties was Jerzy Dudek — that jackass of a dancer who took the mickey out of us by swaying about on his line and then rubbed salt into the wound by saving our spot-kicks. But in time the truly painful sentence was realising that we were entirely to blame.

"How it happened I don't know, but the fact remains that when the impossible becomes reality, somebody has f***ed up — in this case, the entire team. A mass suicide where we all joined hands and jumped off the Bosphorus Bridge.

"When that torture of a game was finished, we sat like a bunch of halfwits in the dressing room there at the Atatürk Stadium. We couldn't speak. We couldn't move. They'd mentally destroyed us.

"The damage was already evident even in those early moments, and it only got more stark and serious as the hours went on. Insomnia, rage, depression, a sense of nothingness. We'd invented a new disease with multiple symptoms: Istanbul syndrome.

no longer felt like a player, and that was devastating enough. But even worse, I no longer felt like a man. All of a sudden, football had become the least important thing, precisely because it was the most important: a very painful contradiction."