Playing with fear in football can lead players to play safe and not express themselves to the best of their ability. Luke O’Nien talked about this and is trying to teach the younger generation about being fearless.
PROCESS ORIENTATED
"What happened last month was all the training put into one. Football is about decisions. Split seconds. I got one right one week and one wrong the following week. One led to a winning goal. The other led to a red card. Both had good intentions which is what I judge my games on now. That is how I balance it in my head. The work I do with Rob has put things into perspective. I am no longer result orientated, I am process oriented.”
ROLE MODEL
"I had a call with the kids in our Inner Game Academy on the Wednesday after the red card. A lot of them struggle with fear of being judged and fear of mistakes. They carry these two fears onto the pitch and it handcuffs them. So we debriefed the hell out of it. We lived the judgement and the mistake that I made, going through it to see how I dealt with it and how they would deal with it. I want to fill that void in their education."
NO FEAR
"We never started football by being fear driven. We just played when we were kids. This fear just gets put into us through big moments like a Sunderland debut gone wrong, or getting released or poorly coached as a kid, where you have not learned the mindset tools needed to play with freedom and at your best. When I step out onto the pitch, the shackles are off me now. I see the game in a different way to how I used to. I used to play with fear. I was just getting through games. It was always about not looking too bad and that is not a way to play football.”
EXPRESS YOURSELF
"You stop expressing yourself and become a prisoner of the game, a passenger. I was so nervous when I first played at Wembley, I forgot to enjoy it. The second time I was better, the third time I was man of the match and the fourth time we were promoted."
INJURY
"My injury was one of the biggest things I have gone through. I thought I had high emotional intelligence but that injury absolutely wrecked me in terms of football and at home. I had no idea why I was feeling how I was feeling. I was a nightmare to live with. It was not until I had a huge breakdown in my basement and my partner called Rob saying, 'Luke needs help. I know how hard it is to connect with people because I was guilty of that. I tried to do it all by myself. I thought I knew all the answers. Now I know I never will.”
HELPING OTHERS
"After that, I saw someone in the exact same place I had been. I saw him lose the plot but nobody else recognised it. I went up to him in the gym and asked him if he was OK twice. He lied to me twice. I phoned him in the evening and he said he was OK again. So I told him about my breakdown, that I was a volcano ready to explode. It was only when I told him that he admitted he was in a horrendous place too, exactly as I had described. He lied to me five times in all. I am OK with that but it shows the problem.”
UNKNOWN
"The fear of the unknown, that is all football is. Am I starting? Am I getting a new contract? How am I going to play? Will I get injured? What will happen if I do? What do people think of me? Should I speak to the manager? These fears keep repeating themselves.”
