How fear can make you a Champion.

As I gaze almost unbelievingly at a Premier League table that shows an unheralded, unglamorous and unassuming Leicester City side top of the Premier League a full 37 points clear of bottom placed Aston Villa, it occurs to me that in football, as in life, the line between failure and success is indeed a slender one.

Failure or success, triumph or disaster, Rudyard Kipling’s ‘two impostors’ are united by the common denominator that is fear and as the author and writer Paul Sweeny says, “true success is overcoming the fear of being unsuccessful.”

Little is said or made about the power of fear in football. But it’s there, everywhere; a pervasive, frequently debilitating, sometimes inspiring, day to day characteristic of professional football from the bottom to the very top.

Recently, Steven Gerrard revealed in a one to one conversation with former team-mate Jamie Carragher that was published in the Daily Mail the fears he went through before the FA Cup final against West Ham in 2006 where he had, arguably, the greatest game of his life.

“The pressure was all on us. Before the game, I started to think how I wouldn’t be able to cope if we didn’t get the Cup. With all due respect, it was West Ham. We had the star names. I remember not being able to sleep the night before,” he says

“When you are a footballer, what people on the outside don’t understand is the fear that grips you about it not going well. It stops you sleeping. It drains you.”

In an earlier interview, also with the Daily Mail, he admitted that it was a fear of becoming just a bit-part player at Liverpool rather than the star he had been that persuaded him to call it a day with the Merseyside club where he had spent his whole career.

Jamie Carragher also knows the feeling well.

Every year, throughout a long and distinguished career, Liverpool tried to get replacements for him leading to his frequent moves around defence as he searched for new ways of doing things. The one constant feeling that he had was fear. Fear of losing his place, fear that he wasn’t good enough to play at the standard demanded of him, To overcome that he just worked harder and harder.

And if it happens to the very best, then imagine what it is like for 15 or 16 year old youngsters who live in perpetual fear of being told from one day to the next that they will not be good enough to make the top grade.

Even in the moments of greatest success there remains a constant fear of failure. Fears of being injured, new faces coming in which result in yours not fitting, a loss of form and/or confidence, a constant fear of being replaced.

In reality it is a fear that remains with them throughout their careers in one way or another.

It never goes away. Ask Victor Valdes who won just about everything there was to win with Barcelona and Spain and is today plying his trade in Belgium with Standard Liege, who, with all due respect to the club, are far below the level a keeper of his standing, would be expected to be playing at.

A freak injury coming on the back of arguably not the best advice in the world and a run in with the abrasive, some might say, corrosive style of Manchester United’s, Louis Van Gaal – who is himself now experiencing ‘in spades’ football’s fear factor – left this once great goalkeeper as nervous as a kitten.

He is not alone. At 23, Vicente at Valencia was considered one of the best wingers in Europe and probably the world. What on earth could go wrong?

Well as it turned our, plenty. Ankle injuries started to become more and more frequent and doubts set in, so much so that even when he was assessed as injury free he didn’t feel he was the player he had been and, even worse, could not see how he could ever return to that level.

By the time he was injury free he found himself effectively ‘included out’ of the equation; ignored, not shunned but somehow something even worse – an irrelevance.

His real problem it turned out was primarily in his head. Fear. After such high expectations from everyone he felt he was unable to fulfil all that was expected of him.

But maybe we are missing the point. Maybe it isn’t fear per se, but rather how that fear is handled that matters.

Sir Alex Ferguson is in the habit of sending messages to recently dismissed managers telling them they should never ever stop being in fear of might happen to them.

What he is saying of course is that it is fear that drives you one, pushes you to the limit; the fear of failure and how to prevent it or put another way and in his own memorable words how to deal with ‘squeaky bum time’ which is not just about how you deal with issues on the pitch

But does fear stop you or drive you to success? Probably both, but dependent on the individual and how they handle it, because if you haven’t got the mental strength to overcome it can become all-consuming.

I remember years ago speaking to the frequently much maligned Joey Barton who told me how important a part fear played in his own game and how he needed to feel it to perform at his very best and, you sensed, to justify the way he played.

Football, as Real Madrid’s former director of football, Jorge Valdano has said, is truly a state of mind, which brings me neatly back to Leicester City who are now playing every minute of every game with the conviction that they can beat anyone they come up against and the fear that it is all going to come to an end is precisely what is driving them on.

No one perhaps summed it up better than Nelson Mandela who in his life knew more about fear than any footballer could ever imagine.

He said, “I learned that courage was not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it. The brave man is not he who does not feel afraid, but he who conquers that fear.”