Lament for boy Sadlier I never got to know

Sideline Cut: Cruelty is relative, of course, but there is something jarring and genuinely sad about the abrupt and muted burn-out of Richard Sadlier, soccer player.

I knew very little about Sadlier beyond what was common currency - that he was regarded by the cognoscenti as a good 'un, tall and willowy and tremulous with promise; one of Kerr's Kids from the brief period at the end of the 1990s when Irish youth soccer stormed the world.

That he had made his senior debut for Ireland was something that most of us had probably forgotten; international friendly matches are so meaningless that watching them is like watching a fuse burn; when it has ended, there is nothing left.

You often imagine that if you tried to video a friendly game, when you rewound the tape, it would still be blank. So it was just possible to fuzzily conjure up the memory of Sadlier playing against Russia; the apprentice, the new boy, ravenous for every ball that floated within his orbit.

Like most people, I am sure I looked at him in half curiosity, wondering if he would "make it" in the accepted sense: if he could somehow bounce into the bright and plastic world of the Premiership, with its megabucks and 24-7 soap opera, and acquire the attendant ticket to all Irish squad gatherings.

When it comes to following Irish players, the Premiership world has probably made us lazy. Rather than trawl through the lower divisions in search of names and reports, it is easier to just wait and see if our young Irish contenders rise with the cream and the froth to the big time.

All it would have taken was a good run for Sadlier, a hot streak across provincial England's cold football grounds and a body that stayed healthy for a season and then he might have caught up with his old Youths buddy Robbie Keane.

It is mad to think that both Sadlier and Keane were literally just beginning their adult soccer lives in 1999. Now Keane is a Premiership franchise man and carries the wary and slightly lived-in expression that comes with that and Richie Sadlier, well, he is retired. How random.

Keane, of course, had the look of a sure thing before he ever started shaving; you can't look that truculent and street-wise, you can't work on such an elaborate gymnastics routine and not make it to the top of your sport.

Being a Premiership star was a fate that Keane would have had to have worked as hard to avoid as most do to make happen. Richie Sadlier, of course, plied his trade in the demi-monde beyond the Premiership Pale and, as such, was invisible to the likes of myself.

English soccer has become so saturated with names and one-dimensional characters and a story line that simply does not vary from season to season that it simply washes away the potential for interest in the "lower" leagues, where life is real and probably a lot more compelling.

Hearing about Richard Sadlier's decision to retire made me wish I had paid a tiny bit more attention to how things were going for him instead of waiting for the day that you simply had to check in on the Premiership round-up to note his progression.

Funny, but most Premiership injuries you hear about seem to be largely cosmetic. The definition of the Premiership injury belongs to one of the Ferdinands (Les or Rio, I can't remember which), who tweaked a muscle in his foot when reaching for the remote control. You just don't hear about career-ending hip injuries in the cottoned world of the Premiership.

No, stories like that do now seem confined to the meatier and darker passages of English soccer that Richie Sadlier had walked.

Millwall was his club, a name redolent of soccer's hooligan past and of Mick McCarthy. But a solid English soccer name, unchanging and part of the furniture, impervious to fashion.

It is impossible not to have a sneaking regard for a club that came up with the old "Nobody Likes Us" motto, which seemed not so much a chant as a manifesto for life.

It is supposed to be a great ground to see a game, Millwall. Located in south London, they say it is accessible and reasonably inexpensive.

It probably evokes the best of the old English first division; intimate enough for the players to seem real and touchable yet big enough to be deafening and thrilling on the frost-bitten nights of March when relegation points or a fifth-round FA Cup place is up for grabs.

Sadlier played for the club in 143 games and in that time scored 17 goals and acquired the nickname "Sads". Judging by the comments that have been posted on the club's website and by those made in this and other newspapers, he was highly respected by anyone who cared about the club.

The poise and grace with which he has reconciled himself to the end of his soccer life suggests that Sadlier is, as Housman had it, a "Smart Lad, to slip betimes away/From fields where glory does not stay."

It must have been the toughest day of his life, just saying enough is enough, admitting that the operations and the hours in the gym, the hanging on to every encouraging word allowed by the consultants, the waiting for the day he could run with impunity was not going to come.

Funny, timing is one of the qualities that separate professional athletes from the rest of us but when it comes to calling it quits, they almost invariably mess it up.

It appears as if Sadlier gave himself every conceivable chance but no more; that he refused to go down the road of self-delusion.

So Russia come to Ireland for a soccer match full of meaning, charged and weighty and full of the autumnal promise peculiar to Lansdowne Road.

It is bound to be a poignant moment for Sadlier for whom that forgotten friendly has now become something of a milestone. And they will talk about Richie Sadlier in the terraces and in the dressing-room tomorrow, but not for too long, because sport is in too much of a hurry to linger on its fallen, in a hurry to achieve the glorious tomorrows that keep us interested.

Twenty minutes against Stoke City is not the way any soccer player imagines it is going to end. You dream of going out like big Niall. But Stoke was the truth of it for Sadlier.

On the face of it, it is a sad story. But then, what do I know?

I never saw any of the 143 appearances for Millwall, nor heard his name chanted by thousands.

I never saw him light up an entire stand with a single touch that separated him from everyone else on the field and never saw him applaud the terraces after a good night, the floodlights beaming and the steam rising off his narrow frame.

I never saw that hundreds of lads with talent burning in their veins would kill for just a sniff of the life that Richie Sadlier knew.

No, I never saw him at all and feel the poorer for it.