The best way to sum up how bad things were for Jesse Lingard was that he had become everything he is not. The fun-loving, extrovert Nottingham Forest midfielder did not want to leave the house. The boy who has always embraced the ball and the game with everything he has did not want to be on the pitch. He was even drinking. Anything to escape the bleakness of his reality.
“I was on autopilot,” Lingard says. “I was having conversations with people and I was just like: ‘Yeah. OK. Yeah.’ Nothing would register. It would go in one ear and out the other. I was numb and I wanted to be in that numb state where I didn’t have to feel anything.”
