AVRIL BRIERLEY is only 26, but she jokes that she feels like an “auld one” by comparison to some of the young players coming through right now at Peamount.
The talented attacker may not yet be a veteran by any stretch, but there is a level of maturity and emotional intelligence evident in the way she speaks about life on and off the field.
She has certainly been around the Women’s National League (or Women’s Premier Division as it is now known after a recent rebrand) for a considerable period.
Back in 2014, as a teenager, she was on the bench for an FAI Cup-winning Raheny team that featured future Ireland star Katie McCabe as well as WNL stalwarts like Pearl Slattery, Rebbeca Creagh, Rachel Graham, and Noelle Murray.
That side additionally won league titles and competed in the Champions League, with future Ireland internationals such as Megan Campbell and Clare Shine also among their graduates.
However, despite her early success at Raheny (who would later merge with Shelbourne), Brierley feels that it is only in the last year or two that she has dramatically improved as a player.
She radiates optimism as she looks ahead to a new season with Peamount, for whom she signed back in December, having spent the vast majority of her WNL career so far at DLR Waves.
Yet the outlook was not always so positive. There was a period where she had “fallen out of love” and “kind of packed in” top-level football in Ireland.
She spent roughly two years travelling on and off, working in Canada and Peru, failing in her attempts to gain residency in the former.
She fortuitously returned home to Ireland just before the pandemic started and had a belated desire to settle down, having grown sick of “the stress of living week to week” out of a suitcase and constantly being left “skint”.
Brierley settled on a more stable existence in Ireland and came back to the Women’s National League, however, this reversion to a more traditional lifestyle was not without its complications.
Mentally, she felt herself struggling, and the situation came to a head one day in front of all her DLR Waves teammates and manager Graham Kelly.
“I went up to training one Saturday morning and I just started roaring crying. I was so upset,” she tells The42.
“There wasn’t anything that particularly triggered it, but my body at that moment was just like: ‘Avril, you can’t sustain this level of thinking forever.’ I remember Graham saying to me: ‘Avril, it’s okay, we will get you help, we’ll get you sorted.’”
Brierley says she has never suffered mental health disorders, nor have other family members ever been diagnosed with depression.
Around the time of the pandemic, she had found her thought processes increasingly difficult to control. Part of it, she suggests, was simply down to the type of individual she was.
“It wasn’t until I went to therapy I realised that I was a people pleaser,” she explains.
“It was consuming my life. I had the weight of the world on my shoulders because I felt like I constantly had to make sure you were okay with me, [other people were] okay with me and how I spoke. This stuff ran around in my head constantly.
“And I think maybe it could have been [due to] Covid, I had more time to think about stuff. I just found my head never stopped.”
Brierley began regularly attending cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) sessions and as a consequence, the player feels she is now benefitting tremendously both on and off the pitch.
“It still goes on but it took me going to CBT to recognise why I thought the way that I did, and finding ways to control it.
“And I do firmly believe that if I didn’t have such a people-pleasing, anxious tendency, I would have excelled in football more than I have. Because it’s funny when I think about Covid and me playing behind closed doors, in front of no audience, for me it was the best news ever. It was 100 fewer people’s opinions I had to worry about.
“I spent most of my footballing career thinking: ‘If I make a mistake here, if I misplace that pass, all my teammates are going to think I’m brutal, the opposition are going to laugh at me, management are going to whip me off because they think I’m crap, the people in the stand are laughing at me,’ that’s how my head would work.
“And then I come off and only play 45 minutes and I’m exhausted. I’m like: ‘Why am I so tired?’ I’m fit. I’m doing all the training.’
“I was expending so much energy in my head having to worry about trying to control and manipulate everyone else’s opinion of me, as opposed to just being like: ‘I made a mistake, get over it.’
“Now I know, no one recognises the mistake after five or 10 seconds. But one, it made me not want to get on the ball for fear of making a mistake. And two, if I did get on the ball and make a mistake, I’d go silent in a game for 10 minutes, because I’d be like: ‘Oh my god, that was so embarrassing.’ And my self-talk became really critical.
“Everything I did, it was ‘that needs to be better’. The perfectionist, people-pleasing tendencies that I had were consuming my life.”
Brierley believes there is a widespread misconception that only people with a diagnosed mental health disorder should attend therapy, and encourages people who are unsure to try it.
“I think everyone should go to therapy, I really do. And if you take more time to just sit back by yourself, and not be so consumed in the rat race of life, I think that’s pretty much why I’m so much more settled now. I’m not constantly chasing a high, a validation.
“I’m like: ‘I’m okay with who I am, where I am.’ I don’t feel like I need to be living in Dubai, to be living a good life. I lived in amazing places, but I didn’t feel the level of self-love and compassion that I do now.”
Brierley suggests social media contributed to the problem to a degree.
“I used to find Sundays really hard because I’d wake up maybe a little after nine, I’d look at my phone and someone is up the top of a mountain with a coffee.
“And I’m like: ‘I really should be doing something now. Look at me, I’m lying in bed, such a laze,’ even though I’ve just worked all week, trained four nights a week, been at the gym twice.”
She believes many others in football have similar struggles, though it remains somewhat taboo in the sport for players to speak so openly and in such detail about their insecurities and fears.
“I always try and tell people about it,” she adds. “Because the more people I talk to, they’re like: ‘Oh my God, I feel like that all the time.’
“It affected my intimate relationships, it affected how I functioned at home with family members.
“Your mind is the driver in your life constantly. I was in CBT for about eight months. And it was the best thing I’ve ever done.
“My relationships have improved, my home life has improved, my relationship with myself has improved. One of the causes of that people-pleasing tendency was the level of self-love and self-worth is quite low.
“So I was constantly trying to fill it up by trying to get validation from other people, as opposed to starting from me and saying: ‘Well, no, I’m okay with myself, everyone else can worry about themselves.’
“Obviously, there’s a fine line, you don’t just become an asshole. I’m still obviously really aware of how I am.”
Brierley believes she is an “entirely different footballer” following the treatment and she had an encouraging season last year, scoring eight goals with DLR.
“I want to get on the ball now because I know I’m good enough. I’m playing in the top league in Ireland, this didn’t just accidentally happen.
“And I do often reflect back and ask: ‘If I had known then what I know now, could my career have ended up in a different way?’
“I always felt I just fell short of squads. I played underage, but I was never a starter.
“When I went up to Shelbourne, I never started. With DLR, I always used to fall short. But I do think it was just how I perceived myself in my brain. I had this imposter syndrome. I don’t think people talk about it enough, particularly in sports.
“Even now, constantly up in training, I’m like: ‘I actually don’t know if I’m good enough to be here.’ It’s only after doing the therapy that I can find myself saying it and catch it early, and say: ‘Avril, that’s nonsense, you’re grand.’”
However, Brierley does feel some players are more prone to negative self-talk than others.
One of her best friends is Ireland international Amber Barrett, who she would have grown up with playing underage football, and the pair often discuss this subject matter.
“I’m like: ‘What do you think about in a game?’ And she’d be like: ‘Oh, I think about my position, I think about how I get around the opposition, tactical stuff. What do you think about?’
“And I’m like: ‘I think about what that random woman up in the stands is thinking about me.’”
One key to a healthier outlook, Brierley feels, is to give yourself greater credit for achievements.
“A lot of people when they talk about success, they say: ‘I got really lucky.’ And I’m like: ‘You worked bloody hard for where you are.’ And I know I’m not at the top of women’s football in the world, but I’ve sacrificed so much of my life like every girl in the National League has for no money.
“We’ve missed birthdays, we’ve missed weddings, so much stuff. You just have to give yourself credit sometimes instead of constantly berating yourself for a missed pass.
“I work a nine-to-six shift, we have a girl training with us and she’s on nights this week. And another girl who played last year with us used to come to training while she was on call in Vincent’s with her burner phone.
“We need to just go easy on ourselves sometimes. It’s okay that you missed a two-yard pass, the world isn’t over.
“The big thing in the therapy I did was overriding the self-criticism [and showing] self-compassion, that’s been a really good tool for me, which is something I think a lot of people could utilise by being able to silence that voice in your head that’s saying: ‘You shouldn’t be here. You’re not good enough.’
“Look at everyone else around you, look what they’re all doing, look what you’re not doing. If you can just catch that, recognise it and say: ‘Okay, it’s just a fleeting thought. You’ve no evidence to support that. You’re on the same team. You were picked for a reason.’ And then just approach it without self-compassion and say: ‘Do you know, Av? You’re fine. You’re exactly where you need to be. Take it easy on yourself.’”
Brierley continues: “I worry that a lot of people really struggle with being able to open up and articulate how they feel.
“I always like to ask my therapist questions because I’m interested in their take on stuff. She said the difficult patients are the ones that when you ask them something, just say: ‘I don’t know.’ They just cut you off.
“Everyone has the ability, but they [sometimes] lack the desire to want to look inside.
“So whenever I feel a certain way, your instinct is to think: ‘I don’t know, I’m just wrecked.’ But if there’s something still niggling, there’s usually a deeper meaning to it. I think people sometimes don’t give themselves the space to explore that.”
Need help? Support is available:
- Samaritans 116 123 or email jo@samaritans.ie
- Aware 1800 80 48 48 (depression, anxiety)
- Pieta House 1800 247 247 or email mary@pieta.ie (suicide, self-harm)
- Teen-Line Ireland 1800 833 634 (for ages 13 to 19)
- Childline 1800 66 66 66 (for under 18s)
