Accessibility links But he turned down the chance to sit with his old team mates in the hospitality seats and will instead watch events
unfold on television back home in Liverpool. He came out of prison only a fortnight ago and, with his movements circumscribed by the terms of his parole, it is, he says, easier not to travel. “Basically, if I break the conditions of me licence, I’m back inside for the rest of me sentence,” he says. “And I tell you what, after what I went through, I’m not going back.” Other footballers have served time: George Best, Tony Adams, Joey Barton have all tasted life behind bars. But they were out after a few weeks. Following conviction for his part in a cocaine ring in 2005, Ward’s was no short stay. “After being on remand, you finally get the sentence sheet shoved under the cell door and they give it you broken down into days,” he says. “I got eight years, so it’s like 3,000-odd days. Some clever person said: ‘you’ll serve four years Mark, do you know how many hours that is It’s 35,000′. I sat on me bed just thinking about that figure. Mind it was one hour less by the time I’d finally got me head round it.” Until that point, Ward had never been much detained with thoughts of the future. As a successful player in the mid nineties, he lived for the moment. At West Ham, Manchester City, Everton and Birmingham, the bustling, energetic, aggressive little winger, fit as a butcher’s dog, always won the supporters’ affections. And off the pitch, brought up as he was in the most modest of Merseyside circumstances, he enjoyed the rewards that came with the job. “I was never clever with my money, never planned for what come next,” he says. “I just missed out on the big money. My best deal was two grand a week. Which is good, I admit. But then you have the lifestyle, the car, the big house, the holidays. So you spend the lot. It doesn’t last. And you gamble. I regret quite a lot in my life, obviously. But I tell that’s the footballer’s real disease my self-esteem was shot, right there. I lost a fortune, chucked it away.”
When age began to compromise his ability, after he had tried his hand in the lower leagues, after a brief, unlucky tenure as manager of Altrincham, he found himself approaching his forties unemployed, bereft, adrift.