From turning out for non-league Leatherhead to being released by Fulham, sleeping on a friend’s couch at Oldham and dipping into his own pocket to train at Charlton Neil Etheridge’s journey to the Premier League has taken him on a roundabout route that also includes racking up thousands of air miles travelling back and forth to the Philippines, where his status as the country’s most famous footballer has just been rubber-stamped.
It is an inspirational story that Etheridge tells as he sits on a stage in Cardiff’s press room, still wearing his green goalkeeper’s shirt, basking in the glow of their promotion from the Championship while also reflecting on the day when he was ready to give up on the dream of carving out a career in the Football League. “I sold my house and I sold my cars and I was about a week away from going back to the Philippines,” says Etheridge, who was born in Enfield to an English father and a Filipino mother.
The year was 2014 and Etheridge had been out of work for five months after being released by Fulham, where he made only one appearance, in a Europa League game under Martin Jol, after joining the club as a teenager from Chelsea. Asked what he did during that time without a club, Etheridge replies: “Paid for myself to train at Charlton Athletic. I was close to the goalkeeping coach there, so I just trained as hard as I could and waited. That time is all in the past now but it will never leave me because it’s made me who I am today.”
In October of that year, with patience running out and his bags packed, Etheridge received a call from out of the blue that put his flight to the Philippines on hold. “I got offered a short-term contract at Oldham, to sit on the bench,” says Etheridge, whose only game for the club was in the Johnstone’s Paint Trophy against Preston North End. “I was living on my mate’s sofa while I was there. But that’s what you’ve got to do to get by.”
A few days after the Preston match, Charlton asked to take Etheridge on loan and he was back at the Valley, where he broke into the first-team in December but was unable to hold down the No 1 spot and was let go at the end of the season in what was starting to sound like a familiar tale. Etheridge was 25 and, when he signed for Walsall in the summer of 2015, he had far more international caps to his name than league appearances.
Yet that move to Walsall proved to be the making of him as he got to play regular first-team football, clocking up close to 100 games over the next two years and prompting Neil Warnock to sign him on a free transfer in the summer in what turned out to be another piece of astute business from the Cardiff manager.
“The manager brought in players that were hungry and had a point to prove,” Etheridge says. “And they are players who believe in his philosophy, which is a winning way. I think he’ll admit himself that we don’t always play the prettiest but we come out with results.”
With 19 clean sheets Etheridge has enjoyed an excellent season and won over those Cardiff supporters who wondered whether he was up to the job. “It wouldn’t be football unless you had critics. There are always going to be doubters and people that will question you as a player but you’ve just got to get through it. It’s been a fantastic season for me. I’m still learning and I’m definitely not the finished article yet.”
Etheridge makes a point of saying he feels a debt of gratitude to Warnock not only for signing him but also for “sticking by me throughout the season”, and he goes on to talk about how the manager “has got every player in the dressing room believing in him”. Even when Cardiff had a wobble over the festive period, losing four consecutive games, Etheridge says Warnock remained positive.
Warnock has already predicted, with a smile, that Cardiff will be favourites to be relegated once the fixtures come out, and it is a measure of how their prospects are viewed that the first question Etheridge was asked when he pulled up a chair after winning promotion was whether he is going to be the busiest goalkeeper in the Premier League next season. Not that Etheridge is bothered about any negative vibes on the back of what has been a landmark season for club and country, with Cardiff’s promotion following hot on the heels of the Philippines qualifying for the Asian Cup in March.
Asked whether he is now the most renowned footballer from the Philippines, which is a country that pays far greater attention to sports such as boxing, basketball and billiards than football, Etheridge laughs and says: “I’d like to think so, yeah. It’s creating history... I’m very proud of my national team, we’ve got to the Asian Cup for the first time and I’m the first south-east Asian player to get promoted and, hopefully, to play in the Premier League next season.”
The Guardian Sport
