BarcelonaA hat-trick per game, this is Asisat Oshoala’s unstoppable pace in recent weeks. After the match against Betis in La Liga, where she scored three goals again, the Nigerian striker was placed as La Liga’s top scorer, with 13 goals in seven games. In the last three games he has scored a hat-trick in each one. The moment of form is unbeatable and the confidence, overwhelming. However, Asisat is peculiar. His coaches detect a certain cyclothymia: now he is on top of everything, but at the beginning of the season the situation was not quite the same.
Oshoala is a different footballer. Her physical qualities make her exceptional and that, combined with her goal-scoring smell, make her one killer manual But like all mortals, she has better days and worse days, and that’s not always easy for someone like her to handle. “She has a special character. Emotionally, she is a rollercoaster. She can be super happy and nice as well as the opposite,” describes Lluís Cortés, who was her coach during the Barça treble season. “She is a person with a very wide emotional range and it is difficult to manage it, sometimes. In fact, she is the one who suffers the most”, adds the Balaguer trainer about the striker, who has scored 10 goals in the last five games .
When things don’t go well, he “focuses too much on the mistake”. “As a player you should not focus on the mistake, but on what you can do to avoid it in the next action. That’s it, it’s already happened and you can’t change it. A game, in the end, are a lot of successive actions and you can’t waste time getting stuck,” says Cortés, who admits that, while he was on the Barça bench, they did individual sessions and specific training with the striker so that she gained confidence when she was faltering. One of the problems with Asisat is that she values herself according to the number of goals she scores, several sources from the dressing room at ARA point out. “It’s true that a striker has to score, but we shouldn’t value her just for that. She generates many more things,” emphasizes Cortés.
With Jonatan Giráldez on the bench, the dynamics to help the Nigerian are maintained. “There is daily work to create awareness in the player”, they say to the ARA from thestaff. To manage cases like Oshoala’s, the coaching staff approaches it from the centre-forward syndrome, which is based on the footballer’s belief that scoring is her main contribution to the team and, when she doesn’t comes, anxiety rises.
Oshoala often makes himself the priority goal of scoring and obsesses over the purely numerical aspect, which paradoxically makes his performance worse. The desire to score paralyzes her and increases muscle tension at the moment of deciding to face the goal, and this generates mistakes that she would not commit without being tense. “The more he mentally moves away from the goal (understood as an isolated event), the more likely he is to score from it. It seems a contradiction, but we want him to focus on all the steps and stages that make up the goal. So, even though don’t score, he continues to have opportunities. Emotional maturity is acquired with greater tolerance for error,” explained Ciutat Esportiva Joan Gamper.
Working with colleagues is also key. “If when she fails, a colleague raises her hand and complains, it doesn’t help Asisat. If she receives a reprimand, she stays there, stuck,” remembers Cortés. thestaff she works with the template that “reprimanding gets you nowhere” and tries to make the messages on the pitch positive, both between teammates and with herself. “It affects us a lot how we talk to ourselves. An assessment can’t be negative, it has to be helpful. The internal dialogue can’t be harmful and we can’t use words like Always o Mayit’s a mental trap,” comments Joan Vivés, a psychologist at the Sant Cugat CAR.
Oshoala seems to have overcome this situation, the numbers back him up. But the work is not done. Although her records have improved and her self-confidence has stabilized, the work must continue to be done day-to-day so that the situation does not turn around and she has a blockage again.
