I’ve known Wilkins for years and didn’t suspect a thing

Ray Wilkins deserves enormous respect for revealing his lifelong battle with illness and depression.

But I have to admit I was shocked by the extent of the problem.

I’ve known him for nearly 40 years without suspecting anything was wrong.

I started playing against Ray in the late 1970s, when I first came into the Ipswich Town team and he was at Chelsea. I was a teenager being given my first taste of senior football, and I was on top of the world. I thought Ray was too.

He was young, talented, and highly regarded enough to have been handed the Chelsea captaincy aged just 18.

It looked to me like he was living the dream, so to find out all these years later that he was taking Valium just to get through the day was a real bombshell.

It’s incredibly sad to think a guy like Ray had to struggle with his mental health over so many years and it’s even sadder when you consider how well he hid it.

To be honest, I understand why he felt he had to do that. In our playing days, depression wasn’t taken seriously.

If you were struggling mentally, you were just told to pull yourself together and get on with it. If you couldn’t do that, you were branded weak.

Ray clearly felt he couldn’t afford to pick up a tag like that, so he hid it all away and suffered in private.

And I don’t think you can ignore the impact his physical health problems must have had on his state of mind.

Again, to learn now, decades after we first met each other, that he has struggled for years with ulcerative colitis is shocking.

We’ve seen in Darren Fletcher’s case how debilitating a condition that can be, and how big an impact it can have on a player’s career.

Nobody should have to go through that in secret like Ray did. So, in that sense, I’m glad it’s finally out in the open.

I do, however, sympathise with him over the circumstances under which he felt it necessary to “come clean”.

Horrible rumours about drinking on the job had been circulating since Fulham’s 3-2 loss to Liverpool a couple of weeks ago.

Ray had a spat with Brendan Rogers, and didn’t appear on the bench in the second half. Less than a fortnight later, he was sacked.

He had no choice but to put the record straight on the booze rumours. Had they been allowed to persist, they ‘d have killed his career.

Hopefully his honesty will finally earn him the support he has deserved for years.