Understanding Championship Pressure and Fear of Failure

When I was 16 I missed a penalty in an All-Ireland quarter final against Meath. There was a two point difference in the game and we went on to lose. I felt like I had failed everyone around me. This feeling continued for weeks afterwards. It wasn’t because we lost the game, but because of what I decided missing a penalty said about me.

I decided it made me a failure, that I wasn’t good enough to play for Cork, that somebody else should have taken the penalty.

This is what championship pressure looks like: convincing yourself of things that are not true. It is very rarely about football.

Threat or challenge

On game day, your mind will make a quick judgement before you’ve had a chance to think about it properly: “Can I handle this, or can I not?”

If your mind decides you can’t, this is a “threat”. You might experience a tight chest, dry mouth, and everything feels like it’s closing in. You start playing not to lose.

If your mind decides you can, that is a “challenge”. Your heart still hammers, but you feel ready rather than drowning.

Players who read a big game as a challenge tend to play better than players of the same ability who read it as a threat.

The goal is never to calm down. I spent years trying to calm down. The goal is to shift your mind from threat to challenge.

Same player, two different games

This year, playing Wandsworth, I missed shot after shot. More wides than I care to count. The old version of me would have taken that as evidence. Wide, wide, wide, three strikes and you’re the problem. That’s what happened with the penalty, one miss became a verdict.

This time it didn’t. Every time I missed I said to myself “next ball” or “head down when shooting”. Not “you’re a failure” or “you shouldn’t be here”. I chose two things I could actually control.

It sounds too small to matter but that’s the point. I wasn’t managing how I felt about the misses. I wasn’t trying to talk myself back into confidence. I gave myself a small job to do immediately.

That’s “challenge”. It’s not the absence of missing, or even the absence of caring that I missed. It’s just refusing to let the miss become a story about what I am.

Fear of failure can be split five ways:

Being ashamed or embarrassed
Thinking less of yourself
Not knowing what happens next
Important people losing interest in you
Letting important people down

The penalty was two of them at once. Letting people down in the moment, and thinking less of myself for weeks after.

Neither of them was about football.

That is why phrases like “just try harder” or “be more positive” don’t work. Try figuring out which of the five you’re experiencing and name it, for example (Embarrassed). This can take a surprising amount of heat out of the feeling itself.

Championship week

Most players who feel the pressure think they are the only one. This isn’t true.

For some players it’s sleep.
For others it’s the body, where every twinge turns into a potential injury.
Some focus on their form, where every poor pass in training becomes evidence.
Some go looking for the opposition on Instagram.
Some read the coach’s body language like it’s a message.
For plenty of people it goes straight to the stomach.

You won’t get all of these. If you’re lucky you might not get any. But if two or three of them sound familiar, this is your nervous system telling you you’re under “threat”.

What I would tell 16-year-old me

Ask yourself what you are genuinely afraid of. Not the match. The thing underneath it.
Name which of the five it is. Naming it takes the heat out of it.
Find the big game you handled well and work out what was different.
Your mind will offer you the disasters first. Make yourself produce the positives.

Championship pressure exists because you care. The players who handle it best are not the ones who stopped feeling. They learned to identify it and acknowledge it for what it was; their body telling them it was a threat. This skill isn’t something you’re born with, it’s a learned practice. I didn’t have it at 16, I didn’t have it last year. I don’t have it all the time now, but it’s definitely becoming easier the more I practise.

References

Blascovich, J., & Mendes, W. B. (2000). Challenge and threat appraisals: The role of affective cues. In J. P. Forgas (Ed.), Feeling and Thinking: The Role of Affect in Social Cognition. Cambridge University Press. Buy on Amazon
Conroy, D. E., Willow, J. P., & Metzler, J. N. (2002). Multidimensional fear of failure measurement: The Performance Failure Appraisal Inventory. Journal of Applied Sport Psychology, 14(2), 76-90.
Jones, M., Meijen, C., McCarthy, P. J., & Sheffield, D. (2009). A theory of challenge and threat states in athletes. International Review of Sport and Exercise Psychology, 2(2), 161-180.

Looking for practical tools to use this in real matches?

Go to the Gael Performance Toolkit for practical tools related to this article.

Open Gael Performance Toolkit