[article=http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/football/article-2606248/EXCLUSIVE-Steve-Peters-claims-know-football-psychology-guru-key-Liverpool-title-charge-reference-Victoria-Pendleton.html#ixzz2z6LOLHxx ]
Steve Peters is sitting in a room at Liverpool’s training ground, a few strides from the office where Brendan Rodgers is masterminding one of the more remarkable pursuits of the Barclays Premier League title.
Peters is, Rodgers and his players will happily confirm, an integral part of their team. A man nurturing the psyche of the Liverpool side that secured that stunning victory against Manchester City last Sunday and will now be central to their preparation for next Sunday’s encounter at Norwich. A man so highly regarded in the game he has also been recruited to tackle England’s deep-rooted problem with penalties at major championships.
He already had quite the reputation in British cycling. Sir Bradley Wiggins, Sir Chris Hoy and Victoria Pendleton have all said they owe much of their success to this slightly built, softly spoken 60-year-old consultant psychiatrist from Middlesbrough.
Yet Peters claims to ‘know nothing about football or cycling’. The complexities of the human brain are, however, another matter and his expertise is gaining currency in the complex, psychologically demanding world of elite sport.
So who is Peters? How does he work? And what precisely does he do?
Rodgers brought Peters into his team at Anfield 18 months ago, not long after taking charge.
‘We work closely together, batting ideas around,’ says Peters. ‘My role is not to tell people what to do. Brendan and David (Brailsford, Team Sky boss and until last week performance director of British Cycling) are the experts.
‘My role is to listen to what they want, where they want to go, and then I make suggestions. As I say, I don’t know anything about football or cycling, so I watch my boundaries.
‘It might be an issue with a particular player. Brendan will ask me if I can get him to do the following, and I will try to do that.’
‘With Dave and Brendan we will have a lot of brainstorming sessions, with a big white board. They are very similar in their approach.’
Clearly, Rodgers and Brailsford store great value by Peters’s methods.
‘Let’s say you’re 95 per cent in the right place mentally and psychologically, but that five per cent could still be the difference between gold and coming seventh,’ he says. ‘That five per cent can be critical.’
In recent weeks a number of Liverpool players have spoken of Peters’s importance.
As well as Steven Gerrard, who approached Peters independently a few years ago, Daniel Sturridge and Jordan Henderson have revealed how important a role the psychiatrist has played in the success they have so far enjoyed this season.
Peters says the two players are dealing with the pressures of the title race very differently. ‘Daniel and Jordan are great to work with,’ he says. ‘They listen. They engage. And they epitomise what I aim for, which is teamwork. We’re a team working on their mind, exploring it together.’
Peters spends one day a week working with Liverpool’s players, individually and collectively.
‘It’s up to Brendan to tell me how he wants them to function as a team. It’s then my job to help him achieve that. To look at who is engaging and who is out of step.
‘I’m very harsh. You can always improve. I think they’re doing really well here at the moment. I can’t compliment the lads enough for their engagement.’
Peters does understand sport, not least because he’s a true athlete himself but came to competitive athletics relatively late.
He tends to win most of his races, but he knows how it feels to choke
. In New York in 1994, he found himself running against ‘six guys with either world or Olympic medals’. ‘I just thought, “I’m out of my depth here”,’ he admits. That day, he concedes, his ‘inner chimp’ got the better of him. Peters is the creator of a phrase and a model that has spread across the sporting landscape: something which describes the part of our brain that can lead us to make the wrong decision at moments of intense pressure.
‘The chimp thing started with my medical students at Sheffield University,’ he says
. ‘I wanted people to understand what was going on in their heads instead of struggling with this mystery of why they get angry or why they suffer from a lack of confidence or low self-esteem.
‘Only when you can understand what’s going on can you answer those questions. We share 98 per cent of our genes with chimps. There are so many similarities it’s frightening.’
He divides the brain into three parts: a rational ‘human’ part, an irrational, emotional ‘chimp’ component and a third part he calls ‘the computer’, which stores information and experiences.
Crucial to any athlete he works with is how well they can control their inner chimp.
Perhaps the most profound testimony to the impact Peters has had on athletes comes from Craig Bellamy. The volatile forward turned to Peters when he was in a dark place, grieving for his great friend Gary Speed and going through a marriage break-up.
Bellamy devotes the final two pages of his autobiography to Peters. ‘Steve Peters has had a huge effect on me,’ writes the Cardiff striker. ‘My quality of life is much, much better. Not one single person in the world has ever made more sense to me than him.’
It is possible, says Peters, for someone to control their emotions by engaging the different parts of the brain by moving the blood supply around. ‘It’s a skill,’ he says. ‘Some people are very good at doing it. Some struggle. But we can all improve.’
How does he help these stellar names perform at the highest level?
‘There isn’t a magic recipe. There are no five things you have to do. It’s about a life change, not just a sport change.
‘But let me give you a very simple example. Let’s say you are stressed about whether your editor will run this article. And let’s say I sit you down and ask you to think of a blue sky or a holiday you’ve been on.
‘You might then tell me you start to feel better, because you’ve switched to that memory, to the computer. You won’t physically feel the blood moving in your brain but you will be aware that you feel differently.’
It’s easy to imagine how much athletes enjoy talking to Peters. The man has a real warmth. Ronnie O’Sullivan was ready to retire from snooker until he met Peters, crediting the ‘genius’ with the two world titles that followed.
O’Sullivan, by his own admission a troubled soul, was reluctant to meet him at first. ‘His manager told him to see me but Ronnie didn’t want to,’ Peters says.
‘Eventually he came to my house and at the end of the first meeting I told him to buy a hardback book and come back with some questions. He did, and the questions ran to 20 pages. He meant business, and that’s true of anyone of that calibre. We will touch base once a week because he doesn’t want to let it slide. It’s like any skill. If you don’t do the work you lose it. But everyone is different. I’ve just seen a player here who comes in with his own notes.’
Last month O’Sullivan declared Peters was ‘working miracles at Liverpool’ before urging Manchester United to sign him up and ‘they will win the league again’.
Peters became involved in elite sport more than 10 years ago when a former student asked for his help. ‘He had taken a job with British Cycling as a medic,’ recalls Peters. ‘And he called me one day and said he had a cyclist he thought might have mental-health problems. I met the cyclist, got them on the bike again and they did extremely well. So Dave Brailsford then gave me Chris Hoy and Chris was a dream to work with.
Some people are psychologically minded. They are very insightful and aware and they know what they want.
‘Steven Gerrard is the same. Very astute, straight down the line. He knows what he needs to do and he just needs the skill base to do it.’
Brailsford has hailed Peters as ‘the best signing’ of his career, while Olympic gold medallist Jamie Staff once said Peters was the glue that held the British cycling team together. Peters has also been instrumental in the success Team Sky have enjoyed under Brailsford, not least in dominating the Tour de France for two years.
It’s why Brailsford has asked Peters to join him in leaving British Cycling to focus on the professional road team.
‘Dave and I gelled because we work as a team,’ says Peters. ‘It’s the same with Brendan.’
Peters added
: ‘Everyone knows what a good team is. But we can’t always make it happen because the mind sabotages the team. However, if you can explain what the mind is doing to sabotage the team, then you can give them the skills to remedy that.
‘I don’t come into here and tell Liverpool players how to play football. That would be absurd. I simply ask if what they are doing is advantageous? What are they doing that isn’t?
'Then you get the player and ask them what they think. It’s my job to get the mindset to operate the way they want it to operate.’
‘I worked with England rugby and I had no idea what to expect. I did a presentation, explaining what I do. And then they came to me. I listened to what they said, asked questions, and we went from there. It’s not for me to walk in with any preconceived ideas. It will come from them and I will apply my expertise to whatever they feel needs looking at.’
So what of England and penalties? Roy Hodgson has signed up Peters for this summer’s World Cup, with one of his briefs to examine what it is that makes England players terrified of them.
‘Because I haven’t worked with the England players yet I can’t really make any comment,’ he says.
‘But you’re always going to do exactly the same thing. You’re going to go in and people are going to tell you.’
In fairness to Peters, he hasn’t been given much time to come up with a solution. But the evidence of Liverpool’s recent victory at West Ham suggests scoring from 12 yards is no longer a problem for Gerrard. The second penalty was his 11th successful conversion of the season.[/article]
