Vestergaard turns to philosophy to put the game into perspective
There is depth as well as the more obvious height during an encounter with Jannik Vestergaard. A conversation this week with the Premier League’s tallest outfield player veered from his love of American football and the rise of Danish film-making to becoming a father and the lasting example set by his own parents. Yet it was while talking about literature, and how he relates to certain books, that Vestergaard offered a particularly revealing insight into the pressures of professional football.
“I was a high-school dropout because I chose to chase my dream,” he says. “Now I like to read for my own benefit, on long coach drives or when I travel on aeroplanes. It’s a very good way of developing – and a simple way of freshening my mind and getting some of the impulsive emotions after a game in the background.”
The truth is that footballers invariably endure a rollercoaster of emotions both before and after matches. Players feeling or even being physically sick in the hours approaching kick-off is not unusual and the wind-down can then often interfere with sleep.
“That is very common,” says Vestergaard, 27. “It’s tough to understand when you are not in it but there is a lot of pressure, a lot of eyes on you and expectation. Some players feel sick before games, some as calm as you like.
“I don’t feel sick but I can have difficulty sleeping, thinking, ‘I could have done this or that’. Or relief. Or just reliving a nice moment a thousand times over. Win, lose or draw, there are a lot of emotions in your body and I think the brain needs to chew through it all. It takes some time and can ruin your sleep after a game.”
So what does Vestergaard read? “I get a bit bored by crime thrillers. I like books that make me think, and where I can see myself in a role that I can relate to,” he says. He enjoyed One Hundred Years of Solitude this year,
a 1967 classic
Colombian master of the literary style known as magic realism, with his works including
(above), and
Leading proponent of the Scandinavian Modern Breakthrough movement which replaced romanticism towards the end of the 19th century.
is one of his best-known novels.
Afghanamerican whose and
probe immigrant experiences of dislocation and ethnic tensions. by Colombian novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez which traces the evolution of a family and town over seven generations. “In any given moment in time, you have a great role to play, or your family does,” Vestergaard says. “Then that time changes… you become an old man. One hundred years later and you are not really anyone. It puts things into perspective, maybe not taking everything too seriously, not letting it affect you too much and seeing the bigger picture.”
Vestergaard also cites Henrik Pontoppidan and Khaled Hosseini as writers who make him think and has been considering how the brain’s conscious and subconsciousness relate to football. “One system is very autonomic but it comes from reflexes which were built on thousands of hours of training consciously,” he says. “Sometimes you have too much time to think, sometimes you just see a reflex, a goal and can’t explain how it happened. I find it interesting.”
When asked what his teammates think of the books, Vestergaard says that he does not make it “a big deal” but suggests that there “might be more footballers than you think” who unwind by reading. Talk of perspective naturally also leads to the most transformative moment of all this year when his wife, Pernille, gave birth to baby Elliott. “It changed everything,” he says. “Going from everything based around being as fit and mentally fit as possible for football to suddenly something else has taken over that No1 spot. Someone is completely relying on you to strive to survive.
“It’s good for me. I do carry a lot of what happens in training and games around. Having a bad day, having an injury, it does affect what mood I’m in. If I’ve had a bad game or the team has lost an important match, I’m not very pleasant to be around; quieter, more irritable. Our son puts things into perspective. It’s a nice break to get home to a family who don’t care what you did on a football pitch. They need you as the man you are and not the football player you are.
“It was [Carlo] Ancelotti who said that football was the most important thing of the less important things. I love football and everything about it, but it’s not the No1 thing in my life.”
As 6ft 6in Vestergaard then outlines his professional career, including the huge teenage decision to move from Denmark to 1899 Hoffenheim in Germany, and then the sense of responsibility he felt amid relegation threats at Hoffenheim, Werder Bremen and even Southampton, you realise just how much he cares.
“It was a little bit of a bold move [going to Germany), not knowing if I would make it,” he says. “I had the full support of my family – ‘Chase your dreams, follow your passion and you can always come back if it doesn’t turn out the way you dream. You can go back to school’. ”
‘I was a high-school dropout because I chose to chase my dream. Now I read for my own benefit on long coach drives’