Those who say time is a healer have probably never played professional football. To us players, time is the great enemy in so many ways.
Adam Johnson knew exactly what he was doing and will have a deservedly long jail sentence to reflect upon it. But his testimony about filling long, dull hours in hotels with texts to his victim will be uncomfortably familiar to many footballers, however unfair the comparison.
“When you’re in a hotel room, it’s easy to text,” Johnson told the court. “You’re bored and you get caught up in texting just to keep yourself busy.”
Some fans have a hard time getting their heads around the fact that we “only” train for two hours a day and have Wednesdays off. But those two hours are at full tilt. Imagine cramming everything you do in a full working day into two hours. The chances are that you’d go home and crash out … and that’s what we do. Hours on a sofa, eating pasta in front of mind-numbing TV shows while we wait for our muscles to repair so we can do it all again the next day.
Some of us try to break out of the monotony, but it’s tough. No doubt you will have read stories of players who have gone into business with a partner, putting the money up for travel agents, clubs, bars, only to find they’ve been fleeced when they arrive at the tail end of their career.
I started a fashion label and lost a fortune. Of course I did. How does a player expect to run a business when the one he’s already in relies on an absolute devotion to doing nothing between training sessions? So I began to collect wine, until I started to drink too much of it, a problem that was thankfully nipped in the bud.
Then I found writing, which has helped enormously in terms of filling time that can so easily lead to the kind of trouble that flirts with me but never seems to land. Plenty of my peers spend their free time in the company of women and see nothing particularly wrong with that, until the media get hold of it.
Free time is a dangerous luxury for Premier League footballers, especially as our capacity to enjoy whatever we want is financially unlimited. It can crack even the most professional player.
