It can be one of the most nerve-racking times of a young footballer’s career – the moment when he is asked to stand on a chair and sing to the whole senior squad. Lewis O’Brien, the 20-year-old Huddersfield midfielder who has been a smash hit on loan at Bradford this season, decided there was only one approach to take.
“There’s no point being there and not going for it,” he says of his rendition of Stevie Wonder’s Superstition, which so wowed his teammates that he has practically become the in-house entertainment. “I’ve probably sung about 30 times this season. Every time we’re down for a meal the lads start chanting, ‘Lewis, Lewis.’ I’ve got a few regulars I do, mainly Superstition, Valerie and Stand By Me. I wouldn’t even say I’m a good singer, I just put a lot of effort into it.”
On the pitch his gusto and canny left foot have had Bradford fans singing his praises, with O’Brien the team’s outstanding player in what has been a mostly disappointing season for the club. The chorus of approval that accompanies his performances contrasts with the social media outcry that greeted his arrival in August. “Who is this nobody?” and “the club are just taking the piss now” were among the more restrained posts when the move was announced. O’Brien was all too aware of that reaction.
“Every person that said something came straight through to my phone and I was thinking, ‘What is going on here?’” he says, laughing at the absurd efficiency with which abuse can be delivered. “As soon as I started seeing them I started searching through Twitter trying to find out how to turn off notifications. Now I only get notifications from people I follow and leave everything else aside. But at the time, all those people going on about this nobody, I used it as a drive, a reason to show who I am.”
If that was not enough to shake the confidence of a young player, then perhaps he was rattled when the manager who was in charge when he arrived, Michael Collins, was sacked three days later? “It was a bit strange,” O’Brien says. “One of the other lads, David Ball, came in the day after me on deadline day and we were speaking to each other, sort of asking: ‘What is going to happen now? The new manager might not like you.’” Ball, a striker with nearly a decade’s senior experience at clubs including Peterborough, Fleetwood and Rotherham, turned out to be a reassuring influence.
“He kind of took me under his wing,” says O’Brien. “He said: ‘You’ve just got to embrace it because this is the worst it can possibly get.’ You have to enjoy it even though it’s a hard graft. The graft is going to pay off in the end.”
It was sink or swim. “This is what I wanted,” says O’Brien. “Go out there and meet new people, prove yourself in a first-team environment. League One is very different from the under-23s. The quality of team is much higher, it’s very physical and the tempo is much higher. I had to get used to that quickly. In my first match I got cramp for the first time in my career – it was in the 83rd minute and we’d already made all our substitutions so I just had to stretch it off.
“With the under-23s I was doing extra gym work after training and I still did that when I first came to Bradford but I started to find it too hard; my body was aching all the time. So now it’s more light work, just getting ready for matches.”
He says that the fitness regime introduced by David Hopkin, appointed as Bradford’s manager in September, has helped the whole team. Bradford, 23rd in the table, have yet to achieve consistently good results, except for a run in December when they won four of five matches, but teams are so tightly clustered at the bottom of League One that a win over 18th-placed Walsall, their opponents on Saturday, could prove significant.
“A couple of wins and you’re 13th so anything can still happen,” says O’Brien. “Our fitness has improved massively – we’re running through 90 minutes like it’s nothing. That is a massive side of the game and hopefully will start to bring more performances like we had in December.”
Despite his team’s struggles O’Brien has stood out for his willingness to seek the ball and pick a pass. He has benefited from being at Bradford and they have benefited from having him. He says: “You could sum it up as the perfect loan move,” provided he helps the team out of trouble. “I’m a Bradford player this season and to help keep them up would mean everything to me.”
Then he will return to his parent club, where he was the most highly rated academy player but has yet to play a first-team game. “I’ve been speaking to [the Huddersfield coaches] Mark Hudson and Leigh Bromby,” he says. “We text and meet up and see how the games have gone.” The progress he has made could prove valuable to Town next season, whether in the Championship or the Premier League. “That’s what I’m hoping,” he says. “To go back and work my way into the first team.”
And what about his early-season social media critics? Have any been in touch to admit they were wrong? “No, people don’t do that,” he says. “That’s not how the world is, is it?”