Clare Shine: ‘I want people to look at my mistakes and not make the same ones’

Almost two years have passed since Clare Shine felt that, after trying so hard to keep going, everything had come crashing down forever. She had already achieved what once felt impossible, rehabilitating from drug and alcohol addiction to continue a hugely successful career with Glasgow City, but now she had to do it all again. A relapse, brought on by the loneliness of Covid-19 lockdowns, had culminated in more suicidal thoughts and a high‑profile 10-hour police search that found her in Edinburgh.

Living with 19 other patients inside the Nairn ward, a mental health unit at Glasgow’s Stobhill hospital, she could not let go of the thought that her chance of recovery had passed. “I felt like I was finished,” she says. “I thought I was done: that this is it for me, I can’t progress or move on from it, it’s taken over my whole life. I didn’t see any way out.”

Once again, though, she stepped back out into the light. On Sunday, Shine will be part of the City side that faces Celtic in the Scottish Women’s Cup final and nobody should be surprised if she applies the decisive flourish once again. She scored a hat-trick in the 2015 final and a last-minute winner four years later, both times having cast aside personal demons. “I’ve learned to enjoy the moment as much as I can,” she says, and the very fact of being back out there is a marvel.

Shine is chatting in the lobby of a Glasgow hotel, which might not be the way most sportspeople would wish to spend their 27th birthday. She has been joking with her teammates that she is in fact still 24 and points out, more seriously, that several years of a young life were effectively lost to addiction; listening to her talk, though, is to hear an older and wiser voice. Shine has known more