When a footballer is told he’s going out on loan, with hours to pack, their world can turn upside down. It can be miserable, writes Roy O’Donovan, but it can also change your life.
The road north out of Sunderland towards Scotland has some spectacular views, but on this particular day I wasn’t taking in any of North-Eastern England’s scenery.
A few hours earlier, my manager at Sunderland had told me he thought I should go out on loan, to get some game time – “come back fitter and better,” he said, with the air of an offer I couldn’t refuse.
Before I had a chance to even think about it, he told me he had offers from Nottingham Forest and Dundee United, and about five minutes to decide as there were only 38 hours left in the transfer window and the clubs wanted an answer. It felt a bit like I was tossing a coin for my future.
That’s why I was driving north across the border into Scotland on my way to Dundee, with a sinking feeling inside me – making a journey I didn’t want to do, on my way to a club I didn’t particularly want to join, and wishing I could just turn around and go home.
The transfer window is an unsettling period at any club in any league, as you never quite know who might be going – or coming. But in the UK, with a busy loan market, it can verge on the surreal as deals appear and disappear by the hour.
If a coach is under pressure, he might decide to shuffle the pack with a couple of signings – trying to shake up the dressing room and spark some good results. Loan signings come with very little risk, at least for the manager.
For the player, though, there’s all sorts of thoughts whirling around your head. To be brutally honest, most decisions you make as a footballer are selfish ones about furthering what can be a very short career and trying to boost your prestige and earning power.
If you’re out of favour, or just can’t get in the team, it can make sense to go play somewhere just for the game time; in the process, some decent performances can remind your parent coach (or any other coach who might be in the market) what you can do, and maybe even earn a lucrative contract somewhere else.
Sky Sports in the UK have made an artform of the theatre of deadline-day, with reporters at grounds and constant updates of who might be on the move.
But the human stories behind those headlines are complicated. You are, in effect, being asked to uproot your whole life for a few months or even weeks, to go live somewhere totally unexpected. If you have kids they will have to move schools, leave their friends for a while, and meanwhile you’re walking into a dressing room where most players just look at you as a threat to their livelihood.
The chances are the coach who’s brought you in is completely uninvested in your future except for what you might be able to do for him in Saturday’s game.
Against all of that you’re expected to show up and perform from the off. You need an absolute Teflon mentality to ignore the hostility in some cliquey dressing rooms, and believe in yourself to make an impression in the only way that matters – on the pitch.
After I’d made my choice for the loan from Sunderland, I went home and told my wife that we were off to Dundee; I’d go the next day and as she’d just passed her driving test I suggested politely that she could follow on in a few days once we’d got everything sorted.
Perhaps naively I thought the manager at Dundee would have some understanding of how a young footballer, about to turn 23 and still learning the game, might feel turning up on a loan deal from an EPL club.
Craig Levein, though, came from the old school style, very confrontational and in your face. When I’m in the right headspace I can ignore that kind of thing, but I was feeling emotional and insecure – I didn’t react well, which just isolated me further in a team that had played together for years and was pretty much a closed shop.
What was meant to be a year long loan ended before Christmas; Sunderland wanted me back because of injuries but I couldn’t drive south fast enough anyway.
But you know, as a player trying to establish yourself at a big club, that another loan might be round the corner, and I had a few more.
At one point Southend signed me on an emergency loan when they had most of their squad out injured – or at least the owner wanted me, and basically promised me the world. I travelled the length of England, was there for a month, scored a goal against Brighton and went back to Sunderland having achieved little else.
But there are times when a loan works out how you’d hoped. After my miserable time at Dundee United, I went to Blackpool for a few months to enjoy playing football again, even though they put me on the right wing; the gaffer, Tony Parkes, gave me a freedom to play.
Then in February 2010, in the last months of my contract at Sunderland, I got offered the chance to go to Hartlepool who were struggling in League One. Everything about this move worked in my favour; Hartlepool is a 20-minute drive from Sunderland so no move was required, I knew a few of the boys in the dressing room already, and the manager, Chris Turner, told me simply: This is your gig, you’ve got 15 games, go score the goals to keep us up.
In the end we avoided relegation on the last day, I got nine goals in those 15 games, and – going back to the aim of furthering your career – I earned a permanent transfer to Coventry in the Championship. Sometimes the toss of a coin comes down in your favour.
