Psychiatric help key to Carragher return
TOP pundit Jamie Carragher’s return to Sky Sports for the start of the Premier League season comes after his sessions with renowned psychiatrist Steve Peters.
Sky said in their statement that Carragher, who was suspended last March after he spat out of his car window at a car containing a 14-year-old girl and her father, is making a comeback — revealed by Sports Agenda — after he took ‘appropriate steps to make sure that the (road rage) incident will not be repeated’.
This is understood to refer to Carragher’s consultations with Peters, who worked with Liverpool during the defender’s last two seasons at Anfield. Peters encourages his clients to control the ‘inner chimp’ primitive part of the brain that often clashes with the more rational part.
Peters was also employed by former england manager roy hodgson at his two doomed tournaments — the 2014 World Cup in Brazil and euro 2016 in France — where he seemed to have minimal impact.
Indeed, the chief memory of Peters from the World Cup four years ago was helping the backroom staff carry out the equipment after england’s three dismal group-stage performances.
But at least Peters can now be credited with a success during the World Cup, albeit not with a current england player.
he declined to talk about his consultations with Carragher because of ‘client confidentiality’.
HE has at every major tournament since he left Arsenal in 2007, David Dein will attend more matches (24) at Russia 2018 than any other senior English football figure. It helps Dein traverse Russia that he can afford to travel by private jet. But it has been Arsenal’s great loss that a man who genuinely loves football was forced out of the club over ‘irreconcilable differences’ by a group of directors who hadn’t a fraction of his passion or knowledge of the game.
The best moments between press and players are always the impromptu ones rather than the FA’s stage-managed World Cup events.
One of the former occurred when a football journalist was FaceTiming his 11-year-old son outside england’s media centre, and saw Dele Alli (right) go past. As the boy is a big fan of the Spurs player, the reporter asked Dele whether he would say hello.
Not only did he do that but then spent some time talking to the youngster about their mutual love of the popular computer game Fortnite.
SEEMS pretty provocative of FIFA to invite Diego Maradona as a special FIFA legends guest to the England v Colombia game after the Hand of God controversy. That said, he is certainly more of a FIFA legend than England’s Wes Brown, who was also on the VIP list last night.