Retired by Alan Gernon

Author:Alan Gernon
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pitch Publishing
Published: 2016-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

6

Mental Health

‘AS a working environment, sitting in a therapist’s chair in a room with a client is as far away as I can imagine from standing on the pitch at The Den playing football for Millwall.’

Richie Sadlier has come a long way since his premature retirement from football. The Dubliner, 37, balances a punditry role with RTÉ with a new career as a counsellor. His move into psychotherapy is in no small part down to his own experiences in coming to terms with the end of his playing days aged just 24.

He first went to counselling in his early 20s in London when he was still playing, after his mother suggested it might help with his emotional state at the time. ‘I’ve never been diagnosed with depression. At the time I just felt kind of overwhelmed, whether it was expectations with family, or homesickness, or pressures of the job, the media or fans. I don’t know what it was, a whole load of things that I couldn’t put a name on,’ he recalls.

‘My head was fried and I wasn’t enjoying football but I didn’t want to leave football. I just felt a little bit lost – “I’m not enjoying this. I’m not enjoying the life that comes with it. Do I have the option to leave it? No, not really, because I haven’t trained myself in anything else.” And then all the managers and coaches and teachers and my family that put so much into it, I can’t let them down. I came out of it quickly enough, but when you’re in it, it’s a bit daunting.’

After his premature retirement through injury, he took a Sports Science degree and a question in one of the modules seemed specifically written about his own experience – ‘How, as a psychologist, would you work with an elite sportsperson who is facing early career transition?’

‘Basically, it was me written on the page in the case study,’ he says. ‘Within a few months of retirement things got fairly bad fairly quickly in my head about the whole thing. This was the first time I thought there were actually people out there who could help as I identified with everything on the page.’ He approached the sports psychologist after class and saw her once or twice a week for several months.

‘There was a lot of self-pity and “poor me” around the whole thing. Just angry for ages. Crying was the constant, I was just constantly crying on my own. And then, when I went to counselling, I could talk openly about what was going on. It was the loss of identity, that was a massive thing. I was “Richie the footballer” since I was eight, that’s how everyone interacted with me and it was how I saw myself. Now the footballer bit was gone, what was left? I really struggled with that,’ he admits.

‘And, just total loss of self-esteem. I just thought that I could bring nothing to the table in any situation. I was just heartbroken, I was crying all the time.

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