Joe Lolley

[Tomaszk]

Quote

Joe Lolley interview: ‘You just get to a point where you don’t really want to… play’

Joe Lolley pats Bear on the head. After stretching her legs at Holme Pierrepont Country Park, Lolley’s three-year-old black labrador has spent the past couple of hours in The Ruddington Arms, in Nottingham, listening to a conversation that has jumped around almost as much as she did during that walk.

Brexit. Non-profit organisations in Thailand. Football fans. “Crap performances”. Supporting Aston Villa. Botox. Grey Goose vodka. Boris Johnson. A confidence crisis. Twitter. The NHS. Nottingham Forest. Las Vegas.

The list goes on and on. And now, with a cold winter evening drawing in and Bear beginning to look a little bit fed up with it all, we have started to talk about income tax. Specifically, how Lolley, who made it clear on Twitter last summer that he was against now-prime minister Johnson’s tax proposals, would be prepared to pay more and take home less each month.

“I don’t understand why it’s such a complicated issue for people to accept,” he says. “Don’t get me wrong. If people came out and said they were going to look to tax you up to 80 per cent, I would be thinking, ‘This is going to really seriously affect me.’

“But when you talk about going up five per cent, which could make a massive difference across the whole country, and it’s not going to make a massive difference to those who are earning good amounts of money, especially the big, big money… I don’t know anyone, whether it’s football or whatever, who is earning a lot of money and couldn’t afford to lose an extra five per cent.”

Lolley looks baffled. “Things need investment: schools, care, the NHS. Everyone knows that,” he says. “So it doesn’t seem that crazy to me that 50 per cent can be the top level of tax.”

The Nottingham Forest winger is on a roll now. “Also, people get so angry, saying you just end up paying for people who cheat the system. There’s so much anger towards them, which I understand because, let’s be honest, people who dodge the system are bad people. Yet companies who don’t pay millions and millions of tax, you never see anger towards them.

“It’s always directed towards someone who is, say, costing the system £12,000 in benefits. There is serious hatred towards them. But a company that doesn’t pay £82 million in taxes… They both cheat the system but one is hated and the other, nobody really cares.”

Lolley, as you have probably gathered, is not one of those footballers who pulls up a chair for an interview and tells you how he’s “just taking it one game at a time” or is “over the moon” to score again.

As a former university student who went from the 10th tier of English football to the second in less than six months, the 27-year-old brings a lot more to the table than that. Gregarious, self-deprecating and refreshingly honest in his outlook on life and football, Lolley is happy to talk about anything and everything — which won’t come as a surprise to anybody who follows him on social media.

“I don’t think it’s right that footballers should have to tweet certain things and that’s it,” he says. “We’re humans and we should stick to our views if we believe in them. But I don’t push them on anyone.”

Some get pushed on to him, though. In October, a Forest fan tweeted, “Joe Lolley is my new scapegoat. Convince me otherwise that he isn’t an average player. Been found out big time. One trick pony.”

After another supporter alerted him to the tweet, Lolley replied with a laughing emoji. His critic then tweeted, “Prove me wrong then, lad?”

Lolley could have left it there, but he didn’t. His tweet in response read: “I’m honest and accept I haven’t been at my best for whatever reason but I’m only one goal down on this time last year (when I apparently wasn’t too bad) so I’m pretty excited for when things click. Won’t be for a lack of trying anyway.”

It’s hard to think of many players who would have typed such a measured and polite reply in those circumstances. Lolley, who has 20 goals and 17 assists to his name since the start of last season, smiles when reminded of that episode. “There’s never a balance to football, where someone says: ‘Joe hasn’t been at his best, he’s been OK.’ Instead of, basically, ‘You’re shit.’”

Lolley flips the scenario to prove his point. “It’s like Brentford [last month, which Forest won 1-0]. I’ve played much better than I played at Brentford but I scored and suddenly you’ve been brilliant.

“I worked so hard in that game. I didn’t touch the ball that much; obviously Brentford is a tough place to go in that respect. But if my shot doesn’t go in… let’s say it hits the bar and comes out and it’s nil-nil and everything else happens exactly the same, but they score a deflected goal and win 1-0. Instead of going, ‘He was brilliant’. People say, ‘He was awful.’”

In other words, there is little sense of perspective in football these days and performances are often judged by one act, rather than a player’s overall contribution. Player ratings are a classic example. Lolley nods.

“People perceive you to be better because the ball has gone in the goal,” he adds.

Footballers talking about football can be dull, often because the shutters come down and they’re afraid to say anything interesting. That, however, is not the case with Lolley.

Mention of the word “confidence” leads to a deep, candid and fascinating conversation that goes on for 20 minutes or more and lays bare what a lonely place a pitch can be at times.

The story starts at Villa Park — a place Lolley loves. Born in nearby Redditch, Lolley grew up supporting Aston Villa and when he drifted away from Birmingham City’s academy at the age of 16, feeling disillusioned after being told that he could carry on training with the club but wouldn’t be offered a scholarship, the Holte End was where he liked to spend his Saturday afternoons.

Lolley went on to play for Bromsgrove Rovers’ under-18s before signing for Littleton, who were in the Midlands Combination League, far enough down the non-League ladder for him not to bother wasting any time looking upwards. “There was never any feeling of, ‘If I do well this season, I could progress,’” Lolley says.

By now, he had enrolled on a three-year sports coaching and performance degree at the University of Central Lancashire in Preston. As part of his studies, some Sunday mornings were spent stood on the side of a pitch filming the Preston North End women’s development team and feeding tactical analysis back to their manager.

All the while, the goals kept going in back home for Littleton — 88 in 83 games to be exact — earning a trial at Kidderminster Harriers that quickly turned into a full-time contract with the National League club after Lolley came off the bench in a pre-season game and scored a hat-trick. By the following February, he was playing for Huddersfield Town in the Championship and quickly establishing himself at that level.

Fast forward a couple of years, to August 2016, and Lolley finally got to play at Villa Park. It should have been one of the highlights of his career at that time, yet the evening turned sour. “I broke my foot and I was out for five months,” Lolley says. “And I never recovered in terms of getting back in the team, confidence and enjoyment, and it probably led to how my [Huddersfield] career went. It’s a bad memory.”

Confidence is the key word in that answer. Lolley doesn’t hesitate when asked about the significance of it. “I’d say if you asked footballers about the biggest thing, they’d say it’s that — confidence. Just from being able to play, to do things naturally without having to think twice, never second-guessing yourself.”

When that self-belief ebbs away — and in Lolley’s case the physical problems he had in getting back to full fitness were a factor — everything unravels. Players start to overthink things and all those little subconscious and instinctive actions break down.

“Physically, I was off it quite a lot,” Lolley recalls. “I came back from my foot injury, so that was five months, and I had [botox] injections into my shins at the end of January and start of February [to relax the muscle around it]. In terms of touch and the speed that my legs were working, I felt like I had no control over what I was doing. So when I was on the pitch I put in some really crap performances.

“There are games now when I play for Forest — and this almost gives me confidence now — when people say, ‘Oh, he didn’t have a great game’, and I think, ‘I’ve been at a stage where my touch would be bouncing off me! I’d give away passes.’ This season, I’ve been through quiet spells but still beaten players or had a good touch, it’s never been where you don’t want people to give you the ball.”

Did he have feelings like that at Huddersfield?

“Oh yeah,” Lolley replies. “It was like, ‘I don’t even want to touch the ball because I don’t know what’s going to happen.’ And then once that happens, it’s a 15-yard pass, a six-out-of-10 difficulty pass, but you turn it down because you’re thinking, ‘I can’t make that pass.’ So you either play it five yards because you’re too scared to try it, or you turn that pass down and suddenly someone is there and closes you down and you don’t know what to do. So you’re second-guessing everything you’re doing. And you just get to a point where you don’t really want to…”

Lolley’s voice trails off as he thinks about what he is going to say next.

“…play,” he adds.

Make no mistake, there will be professional footballers all over the world and at all levels of the game who can totally relate to those thoughts and have been through, or are currently going through, a loss of confidence like the one that afflicted Lolley four years ago. The difference is that not very many would be comfortable enough in their own skin to speak publicly about it.

For Lolley, the fact Huddersfield won promotion to the Premier League at the end of that season where he broke his foot — he made 19 appearances after coming back from injury despite struggling with his form — presented a fresh set of challenges. The sight of a number of the club’s longer-serving players moving on was one of them.

“So then you’re sort of left with players who have only seen the bad side of you and new players who don’t know anything about you,” Lolley says. “You’re thinking, ‘They just think I’m crap.’ They don’t want to give you the ball, or if you give it away, they’re blaming you.”

Lolley built his confidence back up playing for the under-23s, scoring plenty of goals and doing well enough to convince manager David Wagner it was time for him to feature for the first team again. He made his Premier League debut against Brighton in December 2017.

“We then played Southampton away and Stoke and Burnley at home, he was bringing me on for 30 minutes in each. I came on and played well in all of them. I thought, ‘Maybe I am good enough.’ I started the next two league games, Leicester and West Ham. Leicester I was poor, I was very nervous.”

Asked why, Lolley replies: “The emotion of the game, my first Premier League start, it felt like I had a lot to prove to everyone. The ball’s coming to you and instead of taking a touch and running at their full-back, I’d think more about passing it back to our full-back.

“At the the time, the manager — and he’s a brilliant manager, I would never criticise him — didn’t want people to give the ball away; he wanted to play very safe. So then you go into the game more worried about making a mistake than doing something that’s great.

“I played West Ham at home the next game, I started quite well and then I gave a goal away. About 10 minutes later I scored and after that my confidence was really high, I got the ball and wanted to play. And then I never played again. That was my last [Premier League] game.” He was sold to Forest just over a fortnight later.

“The work @SoiDogPhuket is truly amazing, I can’t wait to adopt one day. They save so many beautiful lives and create an environment for them to enjoy the rest of their lives, please donate if you get the opportunity.”

“Come on Joe, where are the photos of young footballer [sic] in Dubai/Miami, downing Moet and Grey Goose? Only joking, what an absolute legend you are, highlighting such a great charity.”

Lolley listens to that reply to the tweet he posted last summer, when he was on holiday in Thailand with Ettie, his girlfriend, and visited the Soi Dog Foundation, and looks a little uncomfortable. “It’s a really difficult subject because the last thing I want to do is come across…”

After pausing for a moment, he adds: “I do think footballers get a hard deal. We still had a luxury place in Thailand — I didn’t go and live in a hostel. I love dogs, so we wanted to go and look at them, and washing the elephants was a good experience too.”

All the same, it is hard to imagine Lolley posting a picture from a Vegas pool party, in stereotypical footballer fashion, with a beer in his hand. “I don’t think there’s anything wrong with what they’re doing. I’d like to go to Vegas, like they do,” he says. “But you wouldn’t be there doing a selfie, with gold champagne, videoing yourself.

“We’ve always had a good dressing room at Forest. We all like to go out on a night out and have a drink and a right laugh, but we’re never trying to be people we’re not. I’d say that’s the difference. A lot of young lads especially have this image that they aspire to be, or feel like they have to be, on social media. I think they feel, ‘If I’m a footballer, I’ve got to go there and I’ve got to do that.’”

That Forest dressing room is missing Lolley’s sidekick these days. Ben Osborn, who joined top-flight Sheffield United in the summer, was his closest friend at the club and Lolley hasn’t had a room-mate since. “I’m loyal,” he says, laughing.

“Ben’s as down to earth as you would ever get. A really nice lad and we see football in the same way, in terms of everything around it. We’re not stupid. You sometimes get footballers who say, ‘I can’t believe I’m not playing. I don’t get why the manager’s not picking me.’ And you’re thinking in your head, ‘Well, the last 10 games you’ve been awful. That’s why you’re not playing.’ Whereas me and Ben, we’d have a bad game and say so. So I think we respected each other. We weren’t talking shit.”

Osborn was one of the Forest players Lolley would occasionally discuss politics with — a subject that he often tweets about and admits he became interested in after the Brexit referendum. “Leading up to that, I dismissed it a bit,” Lolley says. “I thought nothing would change, remain or leave. And then when the result came out, I felt as though I should really start to try and get more understanding and knowledge.”

On the pitch, Lolley is far more right wing than left wing. He loves cutting inside and his tally of 11 goals and 11 assists in the 2018-19 Championship helped win him the club’s Player of the Season award. Forest centre-back Michael Dawson feels Lolley “carried” the team at times in that campaign. “Nice of him,” Lolley says. “I wouldn’t say that. I think there were times where the game might have been going through the motions and I produced something out of the blue.”

Remarkably, Lolley was directly involved in all five Forest goals — scoring one, with four assists — in a 5-5 draw at Villa Park in the November that ensured the second visit of his career to his boyhood club was at lot more memorable than the first just over two years earlier.

As for this season, Lolley senses a real opportunity for Forest, so much so that he says he will be disappointed if they don’t now win promotion. Four points adrift of second-placed Leeds United going into the clubs’ meeting at the City Ground this weekend, an automatic spot is at their fingertips and Lolley knows just how special it would be to play a part in taking the club back to the top flight for the first time since 1999.

Indeed, that seems to be a far bigger driver for Lolley than the idea that he may have a point to prove himself after what happened in his days with Huddersfield.

“It’s more intrigue as to whether you’re good enough,” he says, when asked about any personal motivation to play in the Premier League again.

“I’m not someone who gets way above themselves and thinks, ‘I want to get back to the Premier League because I want to show people that I can do it.’ I could go up to the Premier League and be rubbish and think, ‘You know what, maybe I’m a good Championship player and that’s my level.’ I don’t know.

“But in those five or six appearances in the Premier League with Huddersfield, I thought I handled myself pretty well — and that was at a point where I was a bit short of confidence and playing in a struggling team, so I don’t see why I couldn’t perform there.

“But if I don’t ever play in the Premier League again, I’m not going to look back at 35 and think I’ve failed. The fact I’m here, playing professional football at 27 and I’ve had the career I’ve had, I could retire tomorrow and be proud of what I’ve done.”

That journey was captured with a simple message that Lolley put on Twitter on New Year’s Eve, posting two pictures under the words “very strong decade”. The first showed him in a Littleton shirt, the second photo was of him playing against Arsenal at the Emirates.

Asked what he imagines he will be doing when the next 10 years have passed, Lolley turns the thought over in his mind for a little while.

He eventually comes to the conclusion that he will have retired from playing and pictures himself living overseas, somewhere warm, learning a new language and playing outdoors with the kids every day.

Then Lolley realises he’s forgotten someone. He turns around. “Hopefully you’ll still be alive,” he says, stroking Bear as we get up from the table and head home.

Great interview.

Bolded the football bits I particularly enjoyed. Joe gets it.

[Xela]

Great interview

[Keyblade]

Probably the first footballer I've seen address these issues publicly. What a guy. And he's one of our own. You can just tell he's a VT veteran with that first bolded bit

[Zatman]

Yeah tbe fan criticism is spot on, jump into any player thread and he is either shit or potentially top class depending on the week

[Stevo985]

What a guy. Would love him at Villa

[Xela]

2 hours ago, Stevo985 said:

What a guy. Would love him at Villa

Same. I'm convinced he would have done as well, if not better, than our current wide players, Jack excluded of course. 

 

[Stevo985]

30 minutes ago, Xela said:

Same. I'm convinced he would have done as well, if not better, than our current wide players, Jack excluded of course. 

 

Easily. He’s better than El Ghazi was in the Championship, and I rate El Ghazi higher than Trezeguet. 

Plus you’d get an extra 10% because he’s a Villan

[WakefieldVillan]

Class today but I stuck a fiver on him next goalscorer (25/1) when it was 1-0, can't believe the f**ker passed  

[Keyblade]

Wanted him at Villa in the summer. Think he's better than Bowen that everyone was clamouring to sign this window. He costed too much though. But then again, we're getting what we paid for with Jota and Trez.

[Kiwivillan]

2 hours ago, Keyblade said:

Wanted him at Villa in the summer. Think he's better than Bowen that everyone was clamouring to sign this window. He costed too much though. But then again, we're getting what we paid for with Jota and Trez.

 Bruce should've thrown money at Forest for him instead of all the junk signings

[Tomaszk]

He signed a juicy new contract when his stock was very high and I absolutely don't blame him. That was the window we had to get him to Villa Park. I'm torn between wanting him to play for villa and wanting villa and him to be at the same level.

Ideal scenario...

We stay up. Forest get up. He's shit for Forest for the season. They go down. We pick him up. He's an utter star alongside England captain Jack Grealish. He moves into a coaching role after 3 years of old man wing wizardry.

[Biskitt]

Thanks for posting that interview, really refreshing to hear a footballer being so candid. Always seemed like a great lad on here and looks like nothing has changed since. Would absolutely have had him ahead of El Ghazi or Trez but appreciate those 2 probably cost less combined than he would and we desperately needed the squad depth

[Zatman]

3 hours ago, Kiwivillan said:

 Bruce should've thrown money at Forest for him instead of all the junk signings

Well if Bruce had sense he would have signed him when Huddersfield wanted rid of him

[Xela]

12 hours ago, Keyblade said:

Wanted him at Villa in the summer. Think he's better than Bowen that everyone was clamouring to sign this window. He costed too much though. But then again, we're getting what we paid for with Jota and Trez.

I get why we signed Trez, Jota and El Ghazi as they were relatively cheap an we needed bodies in. Would have been nice to sign Lolley though as well. 

 

[ml1dch]

100th appearance for Nottingham Forest today. Some cracking goals in that clip.

Good on him.

[Stevo985]

I was at the Baggies game yesterday (My mom is a Baggies fan so took her to see the game), and I was 5 rows from the front so had a up close and personal view of Lolley, particularly in the second half when he was basically playing right in front of us. First half he seemed to be playing up front centrally with Grabban but definitely had more luck when he moved out wide.

Probably not one of his best games as he didn't get on the ball much, but he looked so dangerous when he did! Just drives at the defenders as soon as he picks it up.

He probably should have had two penalties, looked like strong cases from where I was and he was livid he didn't get them.

 

Seemed to be carrying an injury as well.

Was interesting to see him that close up. I thought about shouting at him but given I was amongst the Baggies fans I didn't know if it would go down very well!

 

Should be the first name on the transfer targets if we go down this season.

[Zatman]

2 hours ago, Stevo985 said:

 

 

Should be the first name on the transfer targets if we go down this season.

Not sure we could probably afford him, Forest probably want 15 million or so

[Stevo985]

9 hours ago, Zatman said:

Not sure we could probably afford him, Forest probably want 15 million or so

We'd be overpaying if we paid that for him, but we'll have 60 million in the bank from selling Grealish.

I'd be happy to have him in the Premier League, I think he'd be an excellent signing in the Championship

[hogso]

Looks like he is managing Forest in a tournament set up by SI

A number of other players, minor celebs, and FM youtubers are involved. 

[villa4europe]

I'm sure he's a big FM player and tweets about it a fair bit