Is it true you had trouble sleeping until Norwegian sports psychologist Willi Railo taught you how to relax?
I learned a kind of technique. I can just sit here and fall asleep. It takes 25 seconds. So you always sleep well? Always, but not the night after a match. Then it is impossible to relax, there is too much adrenaline in my body. The use of a sports psychologist was that important for you and the teams? I used Willi at my first club, Degerfors, and at Gothenburg and with Lazio, and it worked very well. What could a sports psychologist have done for England in the last World Cup? Could he have saved you from losing out on penalties? It is about focus, especially if you are not the usual penalty taker. A sports psychologist would have taught the players to decide beforehand where to place the ball, to create a focus so you can discard the hundreds of millions who are looking at you on TV when you are walking that short distance from the centre circle to the penalty spot. How many thoughts are going through a player’s head during that walk? I regret I didn’t have a sports psychologist for
