Football needs to realise the brain is as important as a hamstring

COLLY

SINCE Gary Speed’s death in 2011, there’s no question that football’s understanding of mental health has improved.

We saw that last year in the way Everton dealt with Aaron Lennon’s situation, which was fantastic.

And the courage Scottish footballer David Cox has shown in speaking about his problems has helped raise awareness and highlighted some of the issues facing those in the game.

The younger generation are brutally honest on a day-to-day basis when it comes to discussing the problems they face but there is still such a long way to go.

Whenever I’m asked about mental health in football I go back to 1999, when I checked into the Roehampton Priory.

Ratio

I had a strip torn off me by several senior players when I returned to Aston Villa and one of them – I don’t think he’d deny this – was the captain, Gareth Southgate.

They all wanted to know where I’d been when the team needed me and, in front of around 20 players, I said, ‘I wouldn’t be here now if I hadn’t got treatment’.

They were all taken aback. And within a month Villa had employed a clinical psychologist who I’d see other players chatting to. Gareth, now the England manager, and I have spoken about it since and his feeling has been, ‘If I knew then what I know now as a manager…’

His greater understanding is reflected in the game yet I’d imagine the ratio of educated mental-health specialists employed by clubs compares very poorly to the number of physios they have.

I know clubs have people they can call and say, ‘Our player is struggling... any chance he can he come and see you?’ But that’s very different from having someone who’s right there in the thick of a very high-octane working environment.

Players such as George Best, Tony Adams, Paul Gascoigne, Paul Merson, Speed (above) or I could have gone and seen someone who might have noticed there was something troubling us even before we had noticed it ourselves, someone who could have intervened.

It would have made a massive difference to me, particularly as a teenager.

I was released from Wolves as a 17-year-old and the mental toll of having to ring round the non-league to get myself a club was damaging and something that took a lot to bounce back from. Some people will read that and say, ‘Well, I got knockbacks when I was starting out in my career, it’s part and parcel of being a teen, it’s character-building’. But this is where football has a disconnect with what you’d bracket as normal jobs. Former Burnley defender Clarke Carlisle speaks so well about the pressures on footballers from the age of 10 and 11. You are the star player at school and constantly told you’re the best so there’s pressure there. Then it’s the same if you are good enough to join a club’s academy and it could continue all the way into the first team, when there may be 50,000 watching, expecting you to be brilliant every week. You’ve been in competition with other young players throughout your rise to professional level and then you’re in competition with all those fighting for your place in the team. You compete against your opponents as well but, most of all, you compete against yourself.

Take former England captain Wayne Rooney. He has had more pressure on him since the age of 10 or 11 than someone going for a job as, say, an apprentice plumber or journalist since they were 16.

It’s just not the same – it’s an extreme version of what most people would feel day in, day out.

This isn’t to say people who don’t play football don’t feel pressure, there’s just a different kind of gnawing pressure on professional sportsmen and women who every day strive to be the best they can be.

Groin

The pressure I piled on myself, particularly at Aston Villa, was immense.

I went there thinking: ‘I can be the saviour here, the Villa fan going home.’ I bought into that and I could barely walk because of the weight of it all.

The release tomorrow of John Richardson’s book ‘Gary Speed: Unspoken’ will hopefully move football’s understanding on again.

But until football finally accepts that the brain isn’t just as important as a groin or a hamstring, but even more so, then there will still be much work to be done.