https://theathletic.com/2802210/202...y-across-the-game/?source=user_shared_article Decent article on oakwell legend Mike Phenix
Mike Phenix cannot really remember Paul Carden calling him over. He cannot really remember Southport’s manager sending him on against Kidderminster Harriers in October 2015. He cannot really remember Carden waving him back soon after. He cannot really remember the ignominy of being substituted as a substitute after just 10 minutes or so. Yet Phenix just about remembers the night before. He could not sleep. “So, I took a couple of these tablets off my mate… wiped me out.” The rest of the weekend was more or less a blank. Phenix remembers signing for Barnsley a year earlier from Telford United. He remembers one of his two games being against MK Dons, when he was introduced by Lee Johnson and tasked with the responsibility of chasing after Dele Alli. He remembers much of that dreadful period. He remembers struggling to deal with the death of a close relative. He remembers suffering from Crohn’s disease — an inflammatory bowel disease — and hiding it from team-mates and staff. He remembers sitting uncomfortably, being desperate to use the toilet on long journeys for away games. He remembers trying to deal with his own nerves, aggravated because of his health concerns. Phenix does not remember boarding the coach that travelled down the M6 to Kidderminster because he missed it. “Slept straight through… woke up midday.” He does not really remember the conversation with his former girlfriend that persuaded her, despite being heavily pregnant, to drive him in his Ford Ka for a couple of hours from his home in the north west of England. The lift would cost him a “fortune” because, according to Phenix, she dropped him off at the ground and did not hang around. “She went shopping with my credit card instead.” They only arrived in the West Midlands after another delay. This was because of a punctured tyre. He just about remembers the phone in his pocket ringing and Carden asking where he was. He just about remembers telling him, “I’ll be there… I’m on my way.” That was before the breakdown. He can just about remember jogging on the hard shoulder for a couple of miles and then back again from a service station. Southport’s fans were driving past. “‘Are y’alright?’, they’re asking. ‘It’s twenty to three, mate, and you’re on the hard shoulder…’.” Phenix vaguely remembers slurring his words as he tried to explain away what had happened. “I was away with the fairies — still drowsy; don’t know what was in these tablets.” He does not remember much of his contribution to the game. “I was stood 10 metres offside, asking for the ball with my hands in the air apparently… I didn’t know what I was doing.” His then-girlfriend escorted him home that night and he slept for the rest of the weekend. “I was fresh as a daisy on Monday. But I was sent back to Barnsley after that. Lee Johnson rang me and he said, ‘Michael, what have you been doing?’. I said, ‘I don’t know, gaffer’. I didn’t tell him the truth.” Phenix was able to laugh at himself when he told this story to the I Had Trials Once podcast in the summer of 2019 but the tone of the interview changed as he detailed what happened next in his career — an episode that surely makes anyone listening question where the use of sleeping pills might lead. After apologising to Southport, Phenix was allowed to complete his loan before signing permanently and two productive seasons at an upwardly mobile Salford City followed. In 2018, however — at the age of 29 — his career effectively ended during another spell at Southport when he was banned by UKAD (UK Anti-Doping Agency) from “all football activity” for four years after he was found to be using steroids as well as cocaine. Mike Phenix, pictured in 2016, the year after he came on for Southport against Kidderminster Harriers when he was affected by sleeping pills (Photo: Robbie Jay Barratt – AMA/Getty Images) Phenix would rationalise that his earlier need for both sleeping pills, which are legal, and steroids, which is not, were fundamentally the same: both, he thought, would ultimately help him perform after rough days dealing with anxiety stimulated by health worries. He insists he did not use either to gain an advantage on other players. He insists, indeed, that he used them merely to allow himself to be available. Such reasoning has been echoed by a worryingly high number of well-placed sources since The Athletic started an investigation into the use of sleeping pills in football. Medical experts within the game have shared their concerns about levels of dependency at their clubs, as well as places of previous employment, but players have privately admitted they would struggle to get on the pitch without them. Most do not realise there are associated health risks. “It is a disease spreading quietly across football” according to one doctor who suggests “nobody is even trying to start the process of taking care of it”. He says sleeping pills are just as dangerous as some banned drugs if they are abused. “And many are abusing them.” Here, The Athletic can reveal: Players across every level of the professional game are using lorazepam, temazepam and diazepam; prescription-based medications that are habit-forming and are associated with dementia Some players have ignored the advice of their club doctors and have proceeded to medicate unsupervised Some players feel pressurised into using them due to the relentless nature of football’s schedule They have been used to treat anxiety, as well as insomnia related to the increasing number of night games and long-distance travel Players are widely unaware of the dangers of sedatives due to a lack of education in relation to their perils At least one elite footballer at a top Premier League club has been left out of fixtures because of his dependency “It is not a football unique problem,” says an experienced doctor, once appointed to a Premier League club — someone who has taken up numerous medical leadership positions in sport. He stresses that sleep, alongside nutrition, is an essential element of any athlete’s recovery and has a far greater influence than new-fangled technology attached to compression socks or hydrotherapy pools. He believes, however, that football has a very sharp issue to address because the sport is not set up for the players to receive good sleep because of the unsociable hours. He cites the increased number of evening fixtures in the calendar compared to 10 years ago (up by 30 per cent), as well as the increased usage of pre-game and in-game caffeine stimulants. Then there is the stimulus of the actual game — the anxiety of competition, and the external scrutiny and internal criticism that follows. Rather than start to address any of those issues, it is easier for a footballer to speak to a club doctor and ask for help. “Medication, however, hinders a settled sleeping pattern rather than settling it down,” says one doctor who stresses that all of the pills that work well are highly addictive. Increasingly, it has become harder for younger professionals to ignore a developing culture. They are taught to follow what the senior players do, leading to more and more taking risks with their own health without knowing it. Rugby has since turned a corner with their quiet war on the pain killers that many players took, despite limited scientific evidence of their benefits, before and after games. In football, several doctors unfamiliar with one another have corroborated each other’s view that sleeping pills have “no benefit at all” but are “increasingly popular”. Sleeping pills tend to be viewed as harmful for three reasons. First is the hangover effect, which merely pushes underlying problems into the next day. The second relates to the player’s ability to subsequently function as he might. Third, they are highly addictive. There are stories of high-profile Premier League players demanding prescriptions from their club doctor of diazepam, a sedative that was known in the 1950s as “the happy pill” as men and women of war tried to overcome the horror of their pasts. “Problems soon arrive,” says one medical expert. “Withdrawal makes players more anxious and this means they can’t sleep. This leads to them taking another one and before they know it, they are on three or four pills a week. Soon enough, they can’t get by without them.” Doctors in football are placed in difficult positions. At first, they will usually try to manage a struggling player through mechanisms other than prescription. They face a problem if a player, particularly a high-profile one, insists on being given a prescription based on what a team-mate has told him. Medical professionals are answerable to governing bodies when it comes to prescribing medicine, not their employers, but if they say no, they risk the player speaking to the club’s manager. Potentially, that could result in the doctor’s job being in jeopardy. One doctor told The Athletic: “You can try to have a long conversation with the player but nine times out of 10, they’ll still want it. The risk then is, they go to the manager and complain — saying they aren’t getting the level of support they need. Or, potentially even worse, they source the sedative from elsewhere and treat themselves without any supervision.” There is a feeling across the game that a lot more could be done to prevent this from happening. “It should form a part of academy education,” says one medic, who cites campaigns that raise awareness on the dangers of drugs, alcohol, gambling and pain killers — but not sedatives, “even though they fall into the same category of potential harm
Sources close to Premier League players have suggested many are using them to combat night travel after European and international fixtures that involve flying long distances, sometimes to far-flung parts of the world. “If a player is, say, representing his country on the other side of the Atlantic on a Tuesday or Wednesday and he has a game on the Saturday morning, he’s facing a race against time to be ready. One pill can knock anyone out and they wake up the next morning just as the plane is landing.” One Football League player, who has used lorazepam before, admits that he quickly developed a dependency before steering himself away before it was too late. “Initially, you wake up and feel great. But you’re knocking the problem down the road. You’ll feel like **** later. And if you’re anxious like I was, it doesn’t solve that. You’re just masking it for another time.” Falling asleep was never the problem. Remaining asleep was a different matter. A Football League manager explains to The Athletic why he started taking pills before he went to bed. “I’d go out like a light but sometimes, I was only away for three or four hours, then I’d be up, thinking about work the next day,” he says. “For two or three days in a row, this was happening. It was beginning to affect the quality of my life as well as my job, so I decided to find a solution.” He went to see a doctor and was prescribed zopiclone, another sedative that is less addictive than diazepam or lorazepam but is nevertheless still highly addictive. The NHS website suggests the sleeping pill takes around one hour to work. Normally, it is issued for two to four weeks only: “This is because your body gets used to it quickly and after this time, it’s unlikely to have the same effect.” There is another warning on the website: “Your body can become dependent on it.” The common side effects include a metallic taste or a dry mouth and daytime sleepiness. It is recommended that alcohol is avoided. “Having them together can make you go into a deep sleep where you find it difficult to wake up,” the website reads. Serious side effects include memory loss, hallucinations, delusional behaviour and depression. The manager says zopiclone worked, “more or less instantly”. Twelve to 18 months down the line, he realised he was taking them too much. “A couple of days after every pill, I’d begin to feel sluggish. My mind wasn’t as sharp as I wanted to be. Being tired all of the time didn’t make it any easier to sleep for a long period when I stopped taking them, so I started taking more pills — sometimes two or three a week. It was a vicious cycle. I needed to get out of it.” He knows of at least two players currently in his squad who are “on them all the time”. He is unsure whether they have been prescribed by a doctor but he believes it has sometimes affected their performances. He uses that word again: “sluggish”. The manager has tried to steer them away but his advice has “fallen on deaf ears”. He thinks they are most commonly used before away games, in hotel beds, they are unfamiliar with. “Sleep is so important for athletes. If you aren’t getting enough or if you aren’t getting the right sleep, you have problems.” “Players are like sheep,” he stresses. “If someone starts cutting their socks, others will follow. It’s the same with beards, tattoos and washbags. Not many will question whether it’s the right thing to do or the impact it might have, particularly in the long term.” The manager believes he was entering an “even darker place” than the one he started out in when he’d wake suddenly in the night. He was able to pull himself away from that period through research, which guided him towards alternative methods. If he ever has problems in the night now, he listens to podcasts or ocean sounds. Recently, he has learned about self-hypnosis and he says he can send himself back to sleep within 20 seconds. “Sleeping pills are an easy option but they’re not a long-term solution,” he says. “It takes time to realise this. I’m getting old now and I’m more conscious of health dangers. Players are less patient when it comes to finding out what is really good for them. I worry whether they are dependent and where that will lead once their careers are over. Addiction breeds addiction.”
