Footy made Frampton feel sick. He did a ‘deep dive’ into his brain to change that

Billy Frampton would walk around the house or wander up the street and something would make him think of footy. And he’d feel a bit sick.

An image would flash in his mind of him dropping a mark, or missing a kick. It was never a strong intercept mark, punch or clearing kick. It was never good.

So, if he remembered the 2023 grand final, he wouldn’t think of keeping Harris Andrews out of the game, he’d remember the dropped mark at the top of the goal square.

If the broader footy world (before he became a Collingwood fan favourite) considered him a whipping boy, so did Billy. It wasn’t that he thought the glass was half-empty, he wondered why he had a glass at all.

But in the past two years he has flipped the image in his head and the change has manifested in his game. He realised he had to understand when he thought of football it always made him turn to the worst thing that could happen.

“I did some deep diving into my brain and how I operate as a person, and a lot of the stuff I found was that I’m pretty negatively geared in the way I think. I can catastrophise a fair bit and go into the really negative, and that’s just from years of … it’s probably failure and things like that, and that sort of gets the loop you get stuck into,” he said this week.

“So, I tried to figure out some ways to combat that, which I found in the past couple of years have worked really well for me. It’s just positive reinforcement and visualization, and trying to re-wire my brain. So, the end result is I can make a mistake and I can completely move on and not have that turn into a catastrophe in my head.

“I think a lot of that’s just human and [with the] high-performance side of things, you’re always looking at, ‘What didn’t I do well?’, and I’ve definitely been in that boat where you forget all the positives you’ve done and sit in that negative [space].

“My issue was if I start the game with one dropped mark then it’s like, ‘F— no, here’s another one’, then two, then three, and maybe a bad decision. I found it really hard to get out of those patterns, and that’s probably been the biggest development in my game.”

Having been cut by both Adelaide and Port Adelaide before arriving at Collingwood, Frampton figured he understood his place in the game as a battling fringe player and so felt any mistake might see him cut. Even being a premiership player didn’t assuage those feelings. It took this full recalibrating of what he was as a player, and his abilities, to change his self-perception of who he was as a player.

“I think banking enough good games helped the confidence that you know you can play at the level. A lot of it was just trying to change how I think actively. Like, when I’m just walking around the house or moving around Melbourne, whatever [it] is I’d think about footy and have negative thoughts. So I try to just retrain that,” he said.

“I’d just think about myself playing footy, and I’d imagine myself dropping a mark and that just becomes a big sort of a spiral. That was just where your head goes, and I’d naturally revert there.

“So, every time I caught like a negative thought, I’d just change, catch it, and make myself think of something positive I did.

“I did that for a whole off-season in 2023 into ’24, I reckon, and then did it for the whole pre-season again, and then you actually find yourself thinking about footy and imagine myself marking, imagine myself spoiling or doing a good kick and things like that, and you sort of get the ball rolling.

“The trap you can fall into a bit is you think, ‘I’ve had a bit of a battler career’, and that’s how you talk to yourself – ‘Maybe I’m just a player, I fill gaps here and there’, which is a nice humble way to think, but it probably puts some limitations on yourself as well. I think you’ve got to try and really fake it a bit ’til you make it and force those thoughts. Then, honestly, it just started snowballing for me, and then you play well, and you get reinforced.”

As a naturally humble person who is happy being self-deprecating, it was hard to force self-confidence. If there was a moment that summed up both Frampton’s self-deprecating nature and his newish self-confidence, it was this week.

Much of the footy public took time to change preconceptions of Frampton and understand that, for the past few years, he has steadily improved as a player – to the point that this season he had a strong case for inclusion in the broader All-Australian squad. His coach certainly thought so.

When Frampton missed the squad, he was interviewed for a podcast and said he was “flat” and couldn’t believe Nick Daicos got in ahead of him.

“I’m pretty flat … If Nick’s in it and I am not, there is something wrong,” he deadpanned to teammates Isaac Quaynor and Harry Perryman on Players (aired on Nine).

The club chased him around to measure him up for the jacket they thought he was robbed of. Frampton loved it because he could see where the humour emanated came from, but he also had a quiet satisfaction that the idea of him being in consideration among the season’s best key defenders was not a joke.

The absence of his captain and senior key-defender colleague, Darcy Moore, put more responsibility this year on Frampton. Collingwood looked vulnerable in defence – especially if Frampton also went down, given a dearth of tall backs – but also asked him to fill the senior figure role.

“Obviously, I’d rather have him there, but it probably put a bit more of an onus on me to be a really relentless competitor, which is how I’ve tried to pride myself on [through] the year,” Frampton said.

“Just make sure every time I’m near the ball, I’m competing, so it gave me a bit more of an edge.

“I have to do it otherwise, you know, someone’s probably going to come and mark it without Darce there.”

A moment that challenged Frampton mentally more than any dropped mark or missed kick was the tackle on his friend and 2023 premiership teammate Brody Mihocek in the King’s Birthday game. Mihocek ducked into Frampton trying to tackle him on the boundary, and the pair went to ground. Mihocek didn’t get up.

“I just heard him say, ‘I can’t move – I need help’, and that was obviously very triggering,” Frampton recalled.

“That gets you, like, ‘Oh f—, what’s going on here?’ At the time I felt sick. It was one of those ones [where] you go, ‘Oh no, is he OK?’

“You know, I know his son and his missus. It’s like, ‘Have I done this? Is he going to be able to walk?’ So that’s the initial thought.

“Once I heard ‘Checkers’ was probably on the mend, it was that little bit of relief I needed.

“It was something no one, I think, would ever anticipate experiencing. Like, a broken neck is obviously something that’s fortunately pretty rare. You hear about it a little bit in lower leagues, but then it happened on the ’G, and it’s one of your mates as well. It was a very, very weird scenario and obviously an accident.”

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