Covid made me stop and take stock

KEVIN KILBANE TELLS HOW THE PANDEMIC CHANGED HIS WORLD

- BY MARK MCCADDEN

FRIDAY March 13, 2020: The date stamped on the outbound line of Kevin Kilbane's airline ticket.

Little did he know that, for the next 18 months anyway, his flight to Toronto would be a one-way journey.

Up to this point, there had been the outline of a plan:

Kilbane, capped 110 times for Ireland, would eventually settle in Canada with his fiancée Brianne Delcourt.

The pair had met a year earlier on ITV's Dancing On Ice.

They would get married in Ireland. The date had been set. September 4 of that year.

But the big move?

That would happen a year or two down the line.

And then, days after his trans-Atlantic trip, the whole world shut down.

"We've all got our story to tell from Covid," says Kilbane, recalling his own remarkable tale.

"I'll never forget the date. I arrived in Canada on Friday, March 13. Toronto Airport closed down, I think, on the 14th or 15th.

"It basically shut the weekend after I arrived. Every airport across the world was closing down across the course of that week."

Suddenly, the former Preston, Everton and Sunderland man was trapped by the pandemic.

For 18 months, he was unable to leave Canada.

"To get on a flight I had to get vaccinated," replies Kilbane, "but I couldn't get vaccinated because I wasn't a citizen here, I wasn't a resident.

"So I couldn't get the vaccine, which I needed to fly back."

Plans were moved forward.

Kilbane and Brianne bought a house together, they got married in Canada, and Brianne, whose daughter Gracie was three at the time, fell pregnant.

From feeling trapped, he soon came to realise that he had, in fact, been freed by this generational event.

Life on the other side of the Atlantic had been spinning out of control.

But unable to get a work permit in Canada, Kilbane was forced to take stock.