Shelvey: I’m seeing a psychologist
Sometimes I need to walk away... but I can’t help it
NEWCASTLE captain Jonjo Shelvey became the villain of the opening Premier League weekend when he was sent off for stamping on Dele Alli’s ankle during his team’s 2-0 home defeat by Tottenham.
Shelvey was labelled ‘pathetic’ by another former Newcastle skipper Alan Shearer and now faces the grim possibility of losing the captaincy at St James’ Park.
Last Friday, Football Editor Ian Ladyman spoke to the 25-year-old about the efforts he has been making to try to counter his dark side. IT WAS not at St James’ Park, Newcastle, on Sunday that Jonjo Shelvey realised he had a problem. That reality dawned eight months earlier in the away dressing room at Nottingham Forest’s City Ground. Sent off for kicking out at an opponent on the floor, Shelvey took his mobile phone out before he had even taken his boots off.
‘I texted my agent saying I needed to sort this out,’ Shelvey told
Sportsmail. ‘I said, “I need to see someone who can help me, a psychologist”. The game was still going on but I knew I had to act.
‘The lad had given me a dig and he only did it because I was running the game. But I just kicked out at him and it was childish.’
That red card in Nottingham was rescinded. The one Shelvey received for treading on Alli’s ankle this weekend will not be.
One game into a Premier League season the 25-year-old knows will be the most important of his career and he is back to square one. One game, one defeat, one sending-off. Criticismiti i h has b been quickik andd th the only consolation he can take is that he knows he has a problem and is trying to fix it.
‘Look, sometimes I just need to rein it in,’ he said. ‘Just shut up and walk away. But sometimes I can’t help it. It’s like any walk of life. If you are driving and someone cuts you up you are gonna want to start shouting.
‘It’s probably normal but it’s something I need to nip in the bud. So after Forest I started to see a psychologist and it’s been really good so far. But it’s an ongoing process. I want to be competitive but I need to smooth some of the edges or I will be the one who suffers. Sometimes I can lose my head and it can’t keep happening can it?’
Shelvey hates it when he can’t play football. He said so when we sat down for an hour last Friday. So the days will drag until he can return from a three-game ban on September 10. His dad Graham will be in his ear, too. Shelvey’s former youth coach at West Ham, Graham still texts him to tell him to get to training on time.
‘He asks if I am in yet and I am like, “No dad, I am not going to bother with training today…”,’ smiled Shelvey.
‘But when stuff happens it’s the ban that kills you. The fines you can take and what people say you can live with. But it’s the bans that hurt you inside.
‘Knowing that you can’t help your team and that you can’t play football. Because that’s what you want to do, you want to play football, and when you can’t it’s shocking.’ SHELVEY was born with alopecia, the condition which prevents his hair from growing properly. As a nine-year- old, he would wear a hat at football training with Arsenal. Other days, he used to get up early to try to brush the hair he did have over the top of the bald patches.
‘I tried treatments,’ he revealed. ‘I rubbed an ointment into my head but I had to sleep in a woolly hat for three months so that it could work.
‘My head was sweating so much I just tore it off. So that wasn’t going to happen. Then, when I was nine, I just shaved it off. It was unusual to see a bald nineyear-old so I would play football in hats. But over time I realised I had to get over it. I realised that you are what you are and if I have alopecia then so what?
‘Deal with it. That was the attitude I took. With the upbringing I have, my dad and granddad would just say, “F*** it. Who cares what people think about you?”.
‘I think that’s where I have got that streak from. That’s what I have become. I am not tough in terms of fighting and stuff but I think I am quite mentally strong and it all goes back to that.’
Growing up on an east London council estate, Shelvey’s illness ensured he was called plenty of names and that has continued.
The most common one on the football field has been: ‘You bald c***.’ Recently, however, those insults have taken on a different tone. Last December, Shelvey was found guilty by an FA commission of racially abusing Wolves midfielder Romain Saiss during a game. The Newcastle captain maintains he didn’t do it.
‘I didn’t say what they claimed I said but that stain will be there until I finish playing,’ Shelvey admitted. ‘We played Leeds last year and when I went out to warm up it was, “Shelvey you racist”.
‘We played Wigan at home and a lad came straight through me in the first minute, down the back of my calf. Then he slapped me on the head as I got up and called me a “bald racist c***”. Then he ran off. But you are going to get that as that is what I have been accused of doing. I am going to take it. Judgment was made.
‘I am not one to be overly bothered. I know deep down who I am. If my daughter was getting something at nursery then that is when it will become a problem. But to shout stuff at me, fine. They are not going to come on the pitch and punch me in the face are they? What can people actually do to me to hurt me? Not much.’
Shelvey’s evidence at last season’s hearing was deemed unreliable but his take on the matter now is categorical.
‘If I had said it then I would have deserved every punishment I got,
but I didn’t say it,’ he says. ‘ You should hear some of the things that are said on the pitch.
‘I grew up with being called ‘‘bald this and that’’ and I have been called ‘‘disabled’’ on the pitch. Some of it is just mental. And I don’t just mean at my level either.
‘I am not one who goes running to the ref and says, “He has called me disabled”. That’s the way I was brought up and a lot of it goes on reputation anyway.
‘When we went to the hearing, I had a top lawyer and before the verdict the FA lawyer even said to us, ‘‘You may as well get going because you have won this’’.
‘ My lawyer tore the Wolves witnesses to pieces. Their stories didn’t add up. And then the outcome was me being banned and a £ 100,000 fine. It is what it is. At the end of the day, they are still in the Championship and we are in the Premier League.’
If Shelvey sounds a little bullish then he isn’t particularly. In conversation, he is more considered than you may imagine. He can be funny, too. A very good passer of the ball, he credits that to drills set up by his father outside their house in Harold Hill near Romford. One hundred passes against the wall with his right foot and then a hundred with his left.
‘I wasn’t allowed to come in unless I had done them,’ he said. ‘I would probably have a little cheat, as he left me to count. I wasn’t academically clever but even I could count to 100! Sometimes my homework got pushed to one side because of that.’ SHELVEY thinks football and his parents’ discipline saved him.
‘It helped me not to let my life go off the rails,’ he said. ‘I would have gone out drinking and doing graffiti and stuff but I didn’t. I wanted to, but looking back, my friends say I made the right decision.’
His best friend is probably his brother George, a footballer so talented that Shelvey offered to cover his wages as a plumber so that he could have a trial at his own first professional club, Charlton.
‘He said no because of drink,’ reflected Shelvey. ‘He didn’t have a problem but he just loved the party lifestyle and going out. He is a football agent now. He has done well but he could get in most Championship teams, I am not joking.’
Shelvey still visits Harold Hill, even though he calls Newcastle ‘home’. He coaches kids at the social club run by his dad but may not be back to the local for a while.
‘I went back about two Christmas Eves ago so dad could have a drink — I couldn’t have one,’ he smiled. ‘It’s quite rough and gets shut down every couple of weeks. But we walked in and I looked across at the TV and there was a bullet hole in it.
‘I was, like, “Jesus”. We stayed in there for a while but I was counting down the minutes to get out.’ This summer involved holidays to Las Vegas with his wife, Daisy, and two children and a trip to Portugal with friends.
‘ I rented a car out there,’ he explained. ‘It was a little Citroen something or other and it was all banged up. We almost wrote it off to be honest. It makes you realise what you have at home.
‘I have worked hard but when you get home and get back in your nice car, it makes you notice.
‘I know it’s only a little thing but there you go. I could have rented a nicer car but it was dear enough as it was. I was trying to be a bargain hunter!’
Not all footballers love their sport but Shelvey clearly does and there is something endearing about that, and indeed his candour. He does, it must be said, say some things that some sportsmen more concerned about their image maybe would not. He admits that he searches for his career highlights on YouTube at home.
He will have plenty of time over the coming weeks. On his Sky box are recordings of some of his best games from his time at Charlton, then Liverpool and Swansea. ‘My dad always wants to watch them,’ he laughed. ‘I’m like, “Dad I’m 25, let’s go and play golf instead”. But it’s good. It keeps me focused and realistic.’
Watching him trudge off the pitch on Sunday, it was hard not to feel for Shelvey. It’s worth noting here that it was only the third red card of a nine-year career.
Sitting with him in the North East on Friday, it was clear above all else just what this coming season — a return to the Premier League — means to him.
‘I have never had a better chance to go and do this,’ he said. This is the best shape I am ever going to be in. Mentally I am the best I have ever been. I welcome the responsibility. I want to put on a show. I want to be a leader.’
Now Shelvey has no choice but to place the football on hold and let the psychology take over. As he spoke about the techniques he uses, much of it focused on pregame preparation.
‘I have tactics that calm me down and mellow me out so I go into the game calm and ready instead of punching the walls,’ he said.
And what about when he is five minutes in and somebody kicks him? What happens then?
‘Then you are back to square one,’ he said with a big smile. It sounded like a joke at the time.