“I read about me that ‘he was the best player who never made it’. I’m devastated to this day for myself and for Evertonians. It’s taken all these years to build the courage to tell people what I could have been.”

These poignant words, delivered in the strongest Scouse, come from one of the great lost talents of English football, Billy Kenny.

He goes on: “I’ve been bitter, I’ve been angry. For 25 years I didn’t have one good day. I had suicidal thoughts, rehabs, jail. You couldn’t write it … but I did, I wrote it.”

We are in The Slaughterhouse pub in Liverpool city centre. On the wall outside, a poster advertises an upcoming event with the man currently sitting inside, speaking to The i Paper.

Billed as “The Goodison Gazza”, it will promote the memoir of the same name that Kenny has written with journalist Jamie Fahey – a moniker inspired by the similarities that Peter Beardsley, then an Everton teammate, once saw between him and Paul Gascoigne, another troubled soul.

The book begins with Kenny’s finest hour in football, 7 December 1992. It was his Merseyside derby debut and the 19-year-old midfielder excelled in a 2-1 win over the Liverpool team he had grown up hating, but who – as the book reveals – wanted to sign him so much that he travelled down with their squad to the 1988 FA Cup final as a guest of manager Kenny Dalglish.

‘My dream was to beat Liverpool’

After that derby victory, he was led to Goodison Park’s boardroom to sign a new contract. Hours later, however, he took his first line of cocaine.

“My dream was to beat Liverpool in the Merseyside derby. When I’d done it, I let my guard down.”

Cue a downward spiral that led to Everton sacking him after just 23 appearances, one England Under-21 cap and two months of rehab in the Priory.

His football career thereafter comprised just six more games – four for Oldham Athletic, two for Barrow. And the descent was just beginning.

“I could never get over what happened, lad,” he reflects. “It led me to addiction for 25 years.”

‘The best player I’ve ever been on a pitch with…’

Kenny had attended the same secondary school, Campion High School, as Steve McManaman, a boyhood blue who did join Liverpool.

A more intriguing juxtaposition is with Ryan Giggs, his main rival in matches between Liverpool and Salford Schoolboys.

“The two of us would get man of the match. Giggs was on the left, I was on the right so we marked each other.

“If you asked Ryan today who’s the toughest lad, he’d say ‘Billy’ because I used to kick f*** out of him and he’d just get himself up and dust himself down.

“He’s the best player I’ve ever been on a pitch with. He was like a gazelle.”

Like father, like son

As with Liverpool, Kenny rejected the overtures of Giggs’ Manchester United, despite a summer training with them. “If I’d gone to Man United, who knows,” he wonders.

Instead, he followed the trail of his father, Billy Kenny Sr, who played briefly for Everton in the early 70s.

How good was he? Fahey, who played against Kenny as a schoolboy, remembers his “peculiarly advanced game sense and desire”.

Kenny himself notes “my vision was better than most midfielders as a young kid”.

As a boy, he had obsessively practised keepy-ups around the tenement block in which he lived.

Yet as his girlfriend, Charlotte, observes during our chat, his addictive personality proved his downfall in an Everton first-team environment marked by its “birds and booze” culture.

Howard Kendall’s alcoholism is an awkward subject on Merseyside, given the reverence in which Evertonians hold their most successful manager.

Yet this was not the glorious mid-80s, but his stuttering second spell in charge.

“Howard liked all his players to have a drink,” Kenny relates.

“On the team coach he’d be sitting there with his legs on the table, in a pair of budgie smugglers, no top on.

“He’d go to me, ‘Billy, come here. Sit down, lad. Get a glass of this Chablis and I’d be arseholed by the time I got off the coach.”

Kenny does not hide his own failings, saying: “It was a mixture of a lot of things, both out of my control and in my control”.

Burying his head in the sand

While he recalls “no help” from his then agent, there were good people whose advice he ignored, including coaches Colin Harvey and Paul Power, who, during Kenny’s stay at the Priory, took turns to visit him for daily training.

By then, though, it was too late. Pat Nevin, a former Everton teammate, has sympathy.

“I feel a wee bit like it was almost inevitable because of his personality and the culture at the time,” he says.

Today, the words pour out of Kenny.

“I’ve been angry but I feel like it’s seeping out of me,” says the 53-year-old, whose cocaine addiction ended on the day of his mother Bella’s funeral 15 years ago.

And with the telling of his story, he hopes to reach a stage where he can offer advice to young footballers.

“I just want to help people now and be the best person I can be,” he adds.

Three pieces of advice for young players

Kenny quotes Michael Branch – another Everton youngster of the 90s who ended up in prison – who told him that at their old club now “there’s 17 people you can go and speak to with your problems”.

The view of a pair of industry insiders, though, is that players can be wary of seeking help from their clubs – and the struggles of those in the modern day show how they can still lose their way.

Kenny’s book ends with three pieces of advice to today’s players, starting with the need to avoid drink and drugs.

He continues: “Have your own agenda. Listen to your parents and immediate family as they’re the only one with your best interests at heart.

“I used to go out with five of my mates but I’d be at the bar with 50 lads. I only knew five of them. I can count my mates now on one hand.

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“My circle is tiny. I stay away from dangerous people, dangerous places and dangerous things. I’ve got a good girl behind me. I’ve got new mates around me now and I’m grateful, lad.

“I should have been dead years ago. I’ve had heart attacks. I’ve overdosed. If I wake up tomorrow happy, I’m winning.”

“The Goodison Gazza” is published by Reach on 8 October