The Sunderland, England, and Sheffield Wednesday promotion hero who ‘never fit in’ and quit football at the age of 23.
“Hello?” says the voice on the other end of the Zoom call. The camera hasn’t caught up with the audio yet, so there’s a brief pause until our guest appears on the screen. And suddenly he appears.
The initial idea is that Patrick Collins doesn’t look anything like we imagined him to when we exchanged communications a week or so before the call.
He’s one of the old Sheffield Wednesday players we’ve long wanted to interview, and the call is the result of a few messages to long-since abandoned email accounts and the odd request for information from ex-teammates.
We attempted to contact him through an old WordPress website he’d created in the months following his retirement from football at the age of 23. We attempted to contact a long-defunct account on the Wednesday fan community OwlsTalk. Collins’ former Owls boss Chris Turner chuckled when asked if he knew what happened to him a few years ago. He appeared to be a bit of an enigma.
