In a very personal column for KeepUp, Wellington forward David Ball reveals the lengths he and his teammates – and their families – have had to go to ensure they’ve been able to play this season.
To be a professional footballer is a privilege – in many ways it’s the best job on earth. But it comes at a cost sometimes, the sacrifices you make as your career unfolds.
But in the 12 years since I made my professional debut, nothing has compared to the last few months, and the way this season has unfolded. As all of us at Wellington Phoenix prepare to head home and play in Wellington on Sunday, for the first time since last season, I want to try to sketch out what it has taken for our club to get to this point.
At the end of last season it felt so good to get back to Wellington and play two home games, even though we missed out on the finals. For my family, it seemed to mean a return to some form of normality. My wife and I signed a two-year lease on a house, and for two months we settled in.
When we realised that the team would have to go to Australia and play the start of this season based back over in NSW, that was the toughest part of Covid for me. It was the third time I’d had to be apart from my family, for what we thought initially would be six weeks. And then suddenly Omicron hit, and it became clear that we wouldn’t be going back to Wellington for much of the season, if at all.
For pretty much all of the lads, it was a hard reality to get used to. In my case, we took the decision that my wife and our kids would move back to the UK, just to give them some stability. In less than three years I think my kids have been to four different schools and we’d lived in five houses. But right across the group, you had young lads learning to be away from home for the first time, staff and players with families, and of course the huge practical disruptions for the club.
I can’t lie, it’s been tough – very tough. And yet some extraordinary things have come out of this from a footballing point of view. The fact we are still in the top six, after everything we’ve been through, is just incredible. We have basically been living on top of one another, in an apartment block in north Sydney, and for those of us who like to decompress away from football it’s been suffocating in some ways.
Yet the team spirit is like nothing I’ve seen before. One of the words we use regularly within the group is “family” and that’s exactly what the group has become. Covid went through the team not once but twice, and I look at some of the young lads who might have expected to play a few minutes here and there, but ended up playing key roles.
I’m sure you can imagine the emotion and the intensity at times. When you lose a game it’s magnified; when you win, it’s still hard to find the space to draw breath and enjoy the moment because of the necessary fact of being on top of one another. I can honestly say I’ve never seen as much of any manager in my career as I have of Ufuk Talay, because he lives in an apartment a few metres away from mine and has done for most of the last two years!
There are many ways in which the experience of the last two and a half years – but especially this season – has been different to what I’ve known from a lifetime in football.
In 21 games we have played our “home” games in as many stadiums as we have our away fixtures. At the start of the season our coaches took the decision to base us in north Sydney, rather than Wollongong, to give us access to better training facilities. And so we have become nomads, our “home” games played at six different venues.
It’s all because of Covid but for any professional athlete that is really hard. Certainly it means you have to change your motivation to deal with that. No Yellow Army, no screaming home support – or not to the degree we would expect in Wellington.
Those fans who have come to see us have become part of the family, their dedication proven forever. And it’s amazing to think that we have one of the best two “home” records in the league this season.
So much of what we do as footballers is about routine and structure. All of a sudden it isn’t, and we’re having to think on our feet.
That has shown sometimes in the inconsistency in results but the fact of where we sit on the ladder has shown the character in this the group. For me, that’s been the biggest part of the whole experience and much of it comes from the manager. He’s worked under the same stresses and strains as us, but also dealing with a lot of stuff outside the game that you wouldn’t normally have to.
Every year he’s had to wait to get his side together, develop our style during the season, bring through young lads and find exciting new visa players. The simplest way I can put it is that he looks after the team and looks after everyone.
We’ve become hardened to the fact that it’s been this way for us. And I think we’ve embraced the challenges and taken it in our stride. We’ve learned to be adaptable and learn to find many ways to get the three points.
We’re still competing and we’re still playing a great brand of football. That’s what’s so good about the group. I’ve banged on about it but Wellington Phoenix is a great club to work at.
Imagine what it’ll be like actually working in Wellington.
