Finding tools to succeed in game of life
Paul McVeigh was just 180 minutes away from the Premier League. Norwich City had beaten Wolves 3-1 in the first leg of the Championship play-offs, Carrow Road had been buzzing and he had been buzzing too, scoring a goal and setting up another. But then as he was driving home down a side street, a little girl broke away from her family and into his path. McVeigh was only going at 20mph but the girl lay motionless on the ground. That night as she lay in hospital he knelt on a pew of a cathedral. That night football, getting back to the Premier League, meant nothing to him.
Thankfully she would recover, breaking just her collarbone, and as it would transpire, Norwich would win that play-off semi-final series with McVeigh putting in a professional shift, but there was no joy in it. All he got from that experience was some perspective. “Although football is a pastime that gives pleasure to millions,” he writes in a new book, “its importance should not be compared with the harsher realities of life.”
Two weeks later in the Millennium Stadium, Norwich would miss out on the Premier League on a penalty shoot-out. In the stands, on the pitch, grown men in yellow cried. But McVeigh didn’t.
As he walked around the pitch afterwards, he found himself smiling. Was he taking defeat too lightly? He didn’t think so. He’d given everything to the cause that season, playing 49 games, scoring 10 goals, and had played really well that day. “So I chose to relish the experience and feel grateful for it, even in defeat.” That attitude, he reckons, is partly why the next year he’d bounce back to become the club’s top scorer — and the year after Norwich would win promotion.
There was a time when McVeigh would have sulked for days after any defeat, not just of that magnitude. As he notes, there is a culture in football after defeats of players being slaughtered, so they feel the need to mope around looking miserable to show much they care. But he would later find as his old coach Paul Lambert would learn from the Germans, such an attitude was counterproductive and detracting from the goal of any footballer, namely: how are we going to win the next game? Learning such lessons the hard way so other young aspiring footballers won’t have to is part of the reason which prompted the west Belfast man to pen a new book, The Stupid Footballer is Dead (Bloomsbury). It’s not an autobiography as such, like current efforts from more famous Irish pros like Eamon Dunphy and Kevin Kilbane, more of a guide to the mental side of football, an area that he is astonished is still hugely neglected in the English game.
You might not have heard of him, bar perhaps his comments 18 months ago that Northern Ireland shouldn’t play God Save The Queen before internationals if they were to attract more Catholics like him to play for the team, but in ways he’s a lot like Dunphy. He’s intelligent, articulate, does some media work upon his retirement, while as a player, like Dunphy, he was a skilful but light kid plucked from the streets of his native city to be signed by a big-time English club (in his case, Tottenham), though not quite good enough to play with and against the best every week. Yet like Dunphy, he was still good enough to play 20-odd times for his country and make a career in the English game for over a decade.
You can see why he did and didn’t make it. He admits he over-celebrated breaking into the Spurs first team, and didn’t report back for pre-season in good enough condition. But after that he would become what Dunphy would term “a good pro”.
While McVeigh has found too many footballers find it uncool to learn from sports scientists and sports psychologists, he wasn’t afraid to avail of their expertise.
While most players tend to accept their skill-set as is, he continuously looked to expand his. Although he was right-footed, he played a lot of his career on the left.
He had the humility and awareness to stay on after training to work on that left foot. By the age of 27 he found he was able to consistently cross with his left foot. At 28 he was taking corners for Norwich in the Premier League with that foot.
Contrary to the title of his book, the stupid footballer is not dead. But as McVeigh and his book have shown, the intelligent one can carve out a good career in football, all the while realising, like Dunphy asked and answered all those years ago, that it’s only a game.
