Former Irish international Andy Reid has announced his retirement from football.
The Dubliner, who is 34 today, played 29 times for Ireland.
But he has been forced to call it a day, having failing to overcome long-standing injury problems.
The midfielder, who starred for Ireland under the management of Brian Kerr and Steve Staunton, hasn’t played a game for his club Nottingham Forest for almost two years due to a groin injury.
He was famously excluded from the Irish squad under Giovanni Trapattoni, but returned to play again when the Italian left in 2013.
"I have no regrets”, Reid told the Nottingham Post.
“I know I did positive things for every team I played for," said Reid, who played with Forest Tottenham, Charlton Athletic, Sunderland, Sheffield United and Blackpool.
"I'm just really, really disappointed that I couldn't finish on a high, maybe with a promotion for Forest. There isn't always a happy ending though.
"I think my fairytale in football is the fact that I've had a long and, in my opinion, good, career.
"The most frustrating thing about it was, throughout the whole period (of his injury), I could get back to around 60 or 70 percent, I could do a full rehab programme, a mini pre-season, and then the last bit: the explosiveness, the sharpness, kicking the ball and the instinctive things that you need to be able to do in football, the things my game was all about – that's when I'd break down".
"It got to the stage where I'd had that many false dawns, that it started to take its toll on me, in my head as well as on my body.
“The hard thing was making the actual conscious decision, but towards the end of last season I knew that was it."
