And it wasn’t until a life-defining moment – after returning home from a Stoke training session earlier this season – that he finally turned the corner and kicked his gambling habit.

Etherington, now speaking openly about his gambling, says he used to fritter away his £20,000-a-week wages with team-mates when his gambling was at its worst at West Ham.

It cost him his marriage and very nearly his career until leaving West Ham for Stoke 13 months ago.

“Looking back on it now,” he says, “how can you prepare for a game when you are playing cards on the bus with lots of money changing hands?

“It was silly. People were taking three, four, five grand on the bus with them. When that was gone, you were borrowing more.

“You could win 20 grand or lose 20 grand on a single journey, which is ludicrous. Then some would play in their rooms. It wouldn’t just stop on the bus.

“It can’t be good for team morale. Any normal human being, if you are losing a lot of money, is you are not going to be happy about it and you are going to resent the person taking it off you.

“You could be going out on to a pitch knowing that your win bonus or appearance money that day is more or less down the drain because you have lost it already.

“There are certain bookmakers who will give you good credit knowing you earn a good wage. You can be betting telephone numbers. My wages were gone every month and I was on good money, about £20,000 a week. It was taking over my life.

“I would place the bets in the morning – first thing I would do, either on the internet or going into a bookies.

“Instead of getting my head right for a game, I was thinking ‘Right, what horse am I going to back today?

“After the game, as soon as I got out of the shower, I would turn on my phone and get the results. I wasn’t even watching the horse run. That’s how stupid it was.

“There would be afternoons when I would go into a bookies with a couple of grand and I would lose it and be gutted.

“I was full of shame and guilt and would hate myself, but within five minutes I would be thinking, ‘Right, where am I going to get the money for the next bet?’. I knew it was going to spiral out of control, but I was still doing it.”

Etherington began coming to terms with his demons when moving to Stoke in January of last year, but it wasn’t until last September that he truly turned the corner after returning home from training to be confronted by his parents, his sister and his new partner, Stephanie.

“They asked me to lay everything on the table, so I did,” he told the Mail on Sunday. “They were crying and I was emotional. They said: ‘We want to help you’.
“I had become very withdrawn, not the person my family knew. When you are a gambler, you are in another world, not really listening. You’re thinking about your next bet.

“It does go on in football, but it is hard to tell with some people. With an alcoholic or drug addict you can look at them and say ‘You are not well,’ But with a gambler it is harder. I was a loner, didn’t tell anyone my business. Most people didn’t have a clue about the debt I was in.

“That day, it hit home how much I had upset them. I realised what I had done to everyone in life I love the most. I realised this had to be it. If it wasn’t, then the next step for me was a gutter somewhere.” Etherington says he hasn’t laid a bet since spending a week at Sporting Chance, the treatment centre in Surrey set up by former Arsenal and England captain Tony Adams, during an international break last October.

He now regularly attends Gambling Anonymous in Birmingham, while his mum looks after his finances to ensure there are no relapses.

But he insists he has already passed one acid test after a bookie e-mailed him to remind him of some money he still had in a betting account he’d forgotten about.

“I could have easily not told anyone about it and thought here’s an opportunity to gamble some money that nobody knows about. But I like to think I had beaten a demon there.

“I understand the illness now and have to go to Gamblers Anonymous meetings, which I do twice a week. in Birmingham.”

But he warns: “The illness will always be there and I know it is waiting for me to get complacent and thinking ‘I am on top of this’.

“If I have just one more bet, I could ruin the rest of my life. And I just don’t want to do that.”