'It's very hard to leave sport behind'

Let's imagine for a moment you're a young footballer with a top English football club. You're getting a decent wage for doing something you would do for nothing. Dreamland.

You've done the hard part in the sense that you've got signed on in the first place. Many others had sought to get to where you are but failed. Wolves is your club or Wolverhampton Wanderers FC to give them their full and proper title.

They give you a contract and you move over to the English midlands. They think you really have what it takes to make it in the big time. They don't just tell you that; they're not all mouth and no action. They follow that conviction up with action by offering you that contract.

Wolves are no slouches; no hit and hope outfit struggling at the lower end of the English game. They are a club with a great history. One of the first clubs in England to install floodlights; the home of legends of the game such as Billy Wright and Derek Dougan. A club that can trace it's history back to 1877 no less when it was known as St Luke's.

Among your colleagues, contemporaries at the club are Robbie Keane and Joleon Lescott. No slouches either. Both go on to mark their mark in the game; Keane is destined to get a lorryload of goals for Ireland and Lescott to win 40 caps for England. That's the kind of quality to be found in the youth team you play in.

Not that your daunted. You're not, you know you have talent, lots of it, but you are plagued by pesky injuries. They arrive not in single spies but in battalions, one after another, seriously hampering your progress. They undermine your morale, eat away at your confidence. Despite all that you get to the fringes of the first team. Then one day you quit. You tell Wolves you're going home. Enough.

That might make for the plot of a novel about a young Irish player looking to make it big in England but it actually happened to Shane Barrett. Signed by Wolves in 1997 his involvement in the club was terminated four years later, not by Wolves, by himself. He had left school at 15 to try his hand across in big time soccer across the Irish Sea. By 19 the dream was over.

"I had a year left on my contract with Wolves but I literally spent the majority of my time over there injured," the Enfield man recalled last week when he spoke to the Meath Chronicle. "I was actually training with the first team at the time and I got a double hernia. I decided enough was enough. I left it. If I had got better advice I probably would have stayed but at the time I was the one making the decisions which, on reflection, is probably not who you want making the decisions, an 19 or 20-year-old kid who doesn't know a whole lot about life."

EMERGING TALENT

It's those words "better advice" that stand out in the context of what Barrett is doing now. He works as a counsellor with Kildare and Wicklow Adult Education & Training Board. His job involves talking to people on a daily basis. Giving advice. Many of those people, of all ages have lost their way, some of them lost in a valley of despondency and looking for a path back into the light. The path to redemption.

"Post Covid a lot of people are still struggling to get back into routines, back into the lives they had beforehand. It presents a lot of problems to a lot of people," says the father of one son.

In the evenings also Barrett is involved in giving advice, guiding people to a better place. He's the director of the Emerging Talent Program with the North East Counties Schoolboys/girls League. The aim of the program is to identify the best young players in the league, invite them in where their development as players is fostered and supervised by a team of qualified coaches, all whom, like Barrett give up their time voluntarily. Over it all is Barrett, the Enfield man who had a taste of the big time; someone who knows where the pitfalls are.

Barrett, 40 sees it as part of his remit not only to help boys and girls become the best footballers they can. Not only that he will happily dispense advice to those who seek it on how to negotiate the shark-infested waters of professional soccer.

"The NECSL program is more designed around international football but obviously if players are progressing to a national stage and are among the most recognised in their age group in the country the liklihood is that they will attract the attention of football clubs both in Ireland and abroad. One of the best pieces of advice I could give players is not to rush into any decision. Make sure they are getting plenty of advice.

"It will be all new to the youngsters and quite often the parents also, they won't really know what's going on themselves. Obviously it's a short lived career so you want the best advice possible. There are a lot of agents out there some who are no doubt very good but I've heard some horror stories too," he adds.

"It's very hard to leave sport behind once you've been in it for so long. I get a huge kick out of working in the Emerging Talent Program, it's my contribution."

BUILDING SITE

Certainly Barrett could have done with somebody guiding him when he decided to up and simply walk away from Wolves. He returned home and almost drifted away from the game completely;, a rich talent lost. At least he was saved from that terrible fate, partly by his own determination to make the most of career, injuries or not.

"I gave up soccer for two years and was working on a building site. I remember getting up one morning, going to the building site and thinking how have I ended up here? That was a wake up call for me so I said right this is certainly not what I want to do for the rest of my life. "

He got involved in a course in DCU aimed at getting young footballers who had returned home from England but didn't have a career path mapped out; a Plan B. He was signed by Longford Town and played in two FAI Cup finals with the midlanders, winning both of them in 2003 and 2000. Not only that he scored in the win over St Patrick's Athletic in '03.

He returned to a life as a professional with Drogheda United when that club experienced some prosperous times. However, he was sidelined by a cruciate injury when the Drogs won the league title in 2007, one of many injuries he endured. In his 12 years as a pro he estimates he spent almost six injured. Still he had his good days with the Drogs such as the night at a rocking Dalymount Park when they defeated HJK Helsinki in a European tie. Special nights. He had a brief spell with a variety of clubs including Monaghan Utd, Cork City, Sporting Fingal, Shelbourne.

Towards the end of his playing days in his late twenties he turned out for Na Fianna in the Meath SFC and helped get to a county final in where they were defeated by Summerhill

He got himself back on track in other ways too. He studied philosophy in Maynooth University and Guidance Counselling in Trinity. He landed a job as a counsellor.

"One of the biggest issues people encounter these days is the pressure to succeed, not necessarily from their peers but society. In general we don't like people who don't know where they are going in life but young people should be allowed to make their mistakes."

Sometimes Barrett wonders how life might have turned out if he had got the kind of advice he gives to others now as a counsellor and director of the NECSL's Emerging Talent program. Anyone who sits down with him will certainly be the wiser. After all he has quite a story to tell. A story full of setbacks but a story of redempion too.