Saido Berahino's response to the disappointment of his doomed transfer to Tottenham last week could not have been in more marked contrast with David De Gea’s after his move to Real Madrid fell through, writes Tom Hopkinson in the Sunday People .
The Manchester United keeper has kept his council while Berahino has taken to social media, threatening to never again play for his chairman Jeremy Peace and angering fans with pictures from a private jet after being given five days off to get his head straight.
The fallout from the two botched bids has rumbled on and intrigued football fans across the country, not least ex-Tottenham and Norwich player Paul McVeigh .
The former Northern Ireland star, 37, now works in sports psychology and he has been fascinated by the players’ vastly different reactions.
McVeigh said: “I was sitting around a table last week with a whole load of people who come from different backgrounds but all want to go into careers in sports psychology.
“We were talking about what golfers are like, tennis players, athletes and how cultural psychology is and acceptable to them, and I’m thinking, ‘In football it’s so low down on the list of priorities it’s only something you look to when you have a problem’.
“Then the Berahino situation came up and it made me embarrassed to be part of football.
“He has behaved like a petulant four-year-old who has thrown his toys out of the pram , it’s almost like he is so far caught up in football’s bubble that he can’t see the wood for the trees.
“If I were working with Berahino, the first thing I’d say to him is that he has to put things in perspective.
“He has to find the awareness that tells him he has been behaving like a child and then he can build on that.
“Self-awareness is one of the 10 competencies I work across with self-confidence, self-reliance, competitiveness, achievement drive, resilience, self-reliance, focus, flexibility and optimism.
“Resilience is also interesting here. It’s all about dealing with setbacks and when things don’t go your way, how you react to give yourself the best opportunity to go and achieve the things you want to achieve.
“It’s how you make a situation work for you.
“De Gea shows you the two ways of dealing with a situation. You’ll always think about a situation in a way that helps you and is constructive in what you want to achieve, or a way that is unhelpful and disruptive.
“He wanted a move to Real Madrid a year ago, so he thought, ‘I’ll work my socks off for Manchester United this season and show what I can do and really hope the move happens’.
“De Gea went on to be Manchester United’s player of the season last year and, even though he hasn’t got his move this time, it will probably happen in January or next summer.
“The way he has controlled his setbacks has been exemplary, the way Berahino has controlled his has been really poor.”
McVeigh has also been impressed by the way Harry Kane has conducted himself at his old club Tottenham and he has dismissed any idea of him being a one-season wonder.
He added: “I don’t know the lad personally, but everything I hear from people who do is that everything about him is top class, so the fact he is getting the success is not a surprise at all.
“I saw him a few times when he was on loan at Norwich and even though he wasn’t performing well then, that actually wasn’t that important because it was almost a process he was going through that was giving him every chance to be successful at Premier League level now.
“All this second season syndrome, whether he has it for a little bit or all season, he will still have a very, very successful long-term career because of the way he conditions himself every day.”
McVeigh, whose book ‘The Stupid Footballer Is Dead’ looks at the mind of a professional footballer being every bit as important as ability, has worked with Norwich’s academy and first team and now works with the youngsters at Crystal Palace while studying for a Masters degree in sports psychology.
And he is still bemused at football’s slow take-up on the importance of the mind in professional sport.
He added: “I think I’m right in saying that Steve Peters was brought in only a few weeks before England went to the World Cup in Brazil.
“Which means the FA - whose four corners of football are set out as technical, physical, psychological and social - have started working on 25 per cent of their game only six weeks or so before a major tournament.
“Can you imagine a team not working on passing or crossing, or doing any gym work, then six weeks before a tournament the manager saying, ‘Right lads, we’ll get started now’?”
To learn more about psychology in sport, visit Paul McVeigh’s website www.think-pro.co.uk
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