Augusto Batalla opens the conversation with a statement that runs through the entire story: “In me, in my person, I was totally depressed, I didn’t feel like going out, I didn’t feel like going to train, I didn’t feel like interacting with anyone.”The Argentine goalkeeper put into words an experience that, for years, accompanied him in silence.In an intimate interview with El Chiringuito, the footballer who emerged from River Plate reviewed his story and told how he was able to move forward and enjoy his great present at Rayo Vallecano.
From the beginning of his professional career, Batalla lived with self-imposed objectives and expectations that, as he acknowledges, he could not fully meet.”When I was little, Madrid came looking for me. I decided to stay in River because I was ready to debut. I dreamed of a spectacular stage and being able to grow. I think that was my goal. I managed to debut, I managed to become champion, but I couldn’t sustain myself in the first level like River, and I had to reconvert myself, spend many years adding in different places. And I think that’s why I say I failed, because they were my own goals and I couldn’t fulfill them.”
The emotional impact of not achieving those goals was reflected in his daily life and professional performance.The footballer himself describes: “Being young I didn’t have much idea of what it was like to be in that goal. So I experienced it in a way that was too temporary at first and I found myself with sporting errors that were diminishing me personally. And well, that’s why I had to convert myself, because when you’re young and you don’t know how to manage your own emotions, you act and react in a bad way. It happened to me on the field, it happened to me off the field.”
External pressure also did not take long to appear.”Obviously River is the biggest thing in America. In South America I think that socio-culturally we are experiencing a general degradation, a total yellow journalism, where a lot of day-to-day frustrations are channeled with football, with sport. I don’t agree, I don’t share, but it was seen that way. The system is like that. I suffered it personally because it was my goal and it was what I wanted, and they also made me suffer publicly, because those clubs don’t expect you. These”The machinery, the system, only expects performance from the players who are in this club.”
On a family level, Batalla narrates the effect of the process on his most intimate circle.”My family tried to support me. Obviously at the beginning I isolated myself a little, I didn’t want to be with anyone, I didn’t want to listen to anyone and that creates even more confinement, things that, when you grow up, you begin to realize that they are not correct, that it is not right to isolate yourself, that it is always okay to ask for a hand, for help. My parents were always there, my friends were always there, but you close yourself in, you form a shell that thinks it will defend you and that’s allcontrary.”
The way out, according to the goalkeeper himself, involved breaking that shell. “Breaking it. It is a very hard job where you have to ask, ask yourself many things, work with your head, go to your traumas, go to the moments that hurt and from there try to grow, that does not guarantee success, it does not guarantee getting up, but it does give you a very great energy to be at peace with yourself, to be in balance and that makes you want to work, you want to go totrain, you want to work a double shift, you want to take care of yourself. A virtuous circle begins to flourish instead of a vicious one, which often happens that when you are bad, we always take refuge in bad things.”
Batalla himself stops in describing the effects of depression: “Yes, in me, in me I was totally depressed, I didn’t feel like going out, I didn’t feel like going to train, I didn’t feel like interacting with anyone. You start to make a shell, a shell that at one point you find yourself totally alone and you have to break it. But breaking it is not easy, there are people who can’t. Many times when someone tells us that they are depressed and someone who didn’t experience it, they don’t.”You understand. You don’t understand, how? How do you not want to go out? How do you want to…? All these things, the people who go through it, we understand it in a very natural way and we try to help only through accompaniment.”
The search for professional help was central to his process: “I went to the psychologist, I continue to go to the psychologist. And my psychologist was the person who could really get me out of there. I didn’t get out alone. I went out with a kinesiologist, with a physical trainer who was a very good friend of mine, who helped me, with the help of an archery coach, with the help of my psychologist above all things. With the support of my partner. It doesn’t get out on its own, it doesn’t get out alone. I think that’s the only truth I can say about all this.Then everyone lives it in their own way.”
The goalkeeper rejects the idea that going to a psychologist is a sign of weakness, an idea that unfortunately is installed in some environments: “Everyone lives it as they can and in their own way and that’s fine. My experience was fundamental, he was the person who helped me the most in my life on a psychological level. And then you also have to have a lot of balls, as they say here, to go out, because when you start scratching, it hurts, it hurts. And you hurt, you hurt, you hurt and, but that’s itwhere you find your truth.”
Regarding the vicious circle of depression, Batalla details: “You start to become much more of a hermit, much more closed. Afterwards, it was very difficult for me to sleep, then you start to resort… because you have to sleep, you’re an athlete, if you don’t sleep, you don’t work. You start to resort to taking some relaxing pill to sleep, I had a time when I was twenty years old and I had to drink two glasses of wine to go to sleep. It’s not normal for a twenty-year-old boy togo through those things.So, you start doing things wrong that the next day they weigh you down.You slept badly, you rested badly, you don’t feel like it.It’s like a wheel that is difficult to stop.And those are the little bad things that deteriorate your sporting performance, your phase as a person, as a friend, as a brother, as a son.
The key moment to seek professional help came during a period of loneliness in Chile, after having been River Plate’s starting goalkeeper: “There is a key moment in my life, which is when I go on loan, I go for a session in Chile and I find that a year ago I was River’s goalkeeper, one of the club’s greatest promises, projects. And a year later I was in a club in Chile alone, a club that was in its infancy, a super small club and I find myself alone there and I say:’What happened from the top of the mountain to where I arrived?What happened?’You started to recapitulate, you started to see a lot of things and that’s when I said: ‘No, this has to be changed.’I can’t go out.’I called a psychologist, I called a physical trainer, a kinesiologist who is a very good friend of mine.We started working hard, double shifts every day, absolutely. I went to the psychologist twice a week.And well, then I started to build and then you start to feel good about yourself and things start to happen that don’t always happen, it’s not that you do this, this, this and the other and you leave.
“After many years, I think that sportingly I have risen, personally I have grown a lot and I am happy to have traveled that path,” concluded Battle.
